


Baba O'Riley and Eleanor Rigby walk into a bar

by thecapn



Series: Baba [1]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Non-Magical, Growing Up Together, M/M, Suicide Attempt, Therapy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-23
Updated: 2012-07-23
Packaged: 2021-03-10 01:41:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 33,234
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27906127
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thecapn/pseuds/thecapn
Summary: AU: Mary never died and if the supernatural exists, it leaves the Winchesters alone.When Dean Winchester was four years old he almost lost his younger brother for the first time to a fire. When Dean Winchester was eighteen he almost lost his brother a second time to a full bathtub and a pack of sleeping pills, citing some decidedly unbrotherly feelings in his suicide note. At twenty-two he's about to lose him for a third time to Stanford University.He and Sam's therapist sit down and talk out the chain of events leading up to and proceeding after what Dean considers to be the worst day of his life. He figures out a few things along the way.
Relationships: Dean Winchester/Sam Winchester, Sam Winchester/Original Male Character(s)
Series: Baba [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2043490
Comments: 8
Kudos: 64





	1. Part 1

  


  
  
In 1863, two years deep into a war that was anything but civil, the city Dean Winchester grew up in put itself on the map with _The L_ _awrence, Kansas Massacre_ or _Quantrill’s Raid,_ depending on whom you asked and where they were geographically situated in the United States of America.

Before the war had even begun, during Pierce’s term as President, when Kansas was bleeding for validation as either a free or slave state, Lawrence had established itself as a mecca for anti-slavery ideation.

With the war for an excuse, William Clarke Quantrill and a guerilla team of Johnny Reb bushwhackers raided the city, four hundred strong descending down upon the city with a mighty fury. Before the day was out Lawrence was a smoldering shade of its former self. One hundred sixty four civilians of the city were slaughtered.

The blood of one hundred and sixty four people with families, loves, and dreams stained the streets of the city Dean Winchester grew up in in 1863.

Time lays down distance between Dean and those people, but it doesn’t scrub them clean from the history books or the presentations over-excited high school teachers give on what they perceive to be a pretty neat connection between their students and a war that’s over a hundred years older than them.

The thought always leaves a funny taste in Dean’s mouth. Lawrence doesn’t look like a place where scores of people were cut down. Lawrence doesn’t feel like a place where screams and fire tinted the air.

Just because he can’t see it anymore doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, Dean knows. He’s not naïve. Bad things happen. Terrible things happen. The world fumbles, recovers, and moves on. The way of life readjusts around the scars that those terrible things leave. Gimp, maybe; crippled by the tragedy, but they carry on.

Maybe that’s why Dean’s here. Maybe he’s crippled by tragedy and needs some help learning how to limp.

Whatever the reason, there is a clock ticking on the wall that’s about to drive Dean completely insane, which he thinks is pretty ironic considering he’s sitting on a leather sofa across a pale green carpet from Dr. Zora Okoro, Therapist. 

_Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick._

“Mr. Winchester,” Dr. Okoro interrupts, Nigerian accent clinging to her tongue thick and rich like honey, making it a ‘Mis-tah Ween-ches-tah’. Her long legs cross at the ankle and tuck underneath her chair, black pencil skirt drawn tight over her knees and up her thighs until a stark white blouse interferes with Dean’s view. The shirt is shocking in its effect of Zora’s coffee toned skin, bringing the beacon of the smile on her face into startling perspective. A pair of thickly rimmed glasses and large hoop earrings frame her high cheekbones and smooth skin and if Dean had been thirty two instead of twenty two he would have been at least partially tempted to fall at least half in love with her on sight.

As it is, though, he’s mostly just irritated and restless.

“Doc,” he responds as he slumps down low on the couch and plays with the idea of throwing his muddy boots up onto the cream colored leather.

Dr. Okoro smiles easily at him and the bangles on her wrist jangle slightly as she repositions the pad of paper in her lap, fiddles with her pen. “So,” she starts encouragingly. “What would you like to talk about with me today?”

“Look, lady,” Dean raises his hands, palms up in a universal ‘don’t ask me’ gesture. “ _You’re_ the one who asked me to come here.”

She cocks one well groomed eyebrow at him. “And you have no idea why?”

Dean leans back into the butter soft leather of the sofa and shoots her a shit-eating grin that’s all pomp and no circumstance. “I mean - shot in the dark here- it probably has something to do with you being Sammy’s therapist for four years or something.” A muscle in his jaw jumps as he clenches his teeth.

“Yes,” she smirks and rests her chin on her open palm. “That could have something to do with it.”

_Tick tick tick tick tick._

“So, what’s up?” Dean does kick up his feet this time, props his Timberland’s up on the other arm of the love seat so that clumps of caked mud and dried grease flake off and he dares the good doctor to say something just to give him an excuse to leave. “If there’s something wrong with Sam you should probably talk to our folks instead of me.”

“There is nothing wrong with Sam,” Dr. Okoro assures gently, “and he has expressed many times over that he would prefer that I take any questions I have to you rather than your parents.” Dean has two seconds to try and hash out how he feels about that one before she’s plowing on with, “How are _you_ , Dean?”

With her accent his name sounds like ‘Den’, with a small rollercoaster in the middle that could have been an ‘a’ at some point before it was caught and smothered in the back of her throat. 

“Same old, same old.” Dean shrugs noncommittally. “Can’t really complain.”

Dr. Okoro leans back in her seat steadily, cool eyes trained on Dean’s expression. He fights the impulse to fidget and say something nasty to turn her off. The late morning sun streaming in through the window at her back catches in her short cropped hair as she considers the young man on her couch seriously. “Sam speaks of you often, you know.”

Dean’s shoulders stiffen to keep from perking up, muscle going so rigid so quickly that for a terrible moment Dean’s sure that he’s torn something that he’s going to need when he goes back to work. The curiosity that lead him to answer Dr. Okoro’s call in the first place, that lead him to the office that he’d only walked in once before to drop Sam off for his first appointment, worms underneath his skin like a restless eel.

He wants to know what Sam says behind closed doors. Borderline obsessed with it, actually. For four years he’s bit his damn cheek and stifled his questions, because anything he wants that badly can’t be good for Sam.

This is it. The missing puzzle piece. Dr. Zora Okoro knows things that Dean would heavily consider murdering to be privy to. He barely understands why he _needs_ to know so damn badly, but Dean’s like a dog chewing at stitches when it comes to Sam. It doesn’t matter that the way things are works, he has to gnaw until things are normal –natural- again.

It’s like a secret club that Dean used to have exclusive membership to before his admission was revoked, and now he’s just itching to get back in. Four years of teething at sutures and Dean’s sitting in Sam’s therapist’s office, starving.

“Yeah?” he croaks.

“Yes.” Dr. Okoro nods easily. “In fact, we could go for many days and he would speak only of you. He admires you very much.”

“Really?” he says, too quickly, but not in the ‘oh-that’s-super-fucking-weird’ way that he had intended, the awe creeping into his tone uninvited. The urge to bask in that information for a few warm moments is overwhelming, but Dean’s been to the school of hard knocks and he knows a few things about other shoes. “But that’s not why you asked me here.”

“I am afraid not.” She clears her throat pointedly, jiggles her pen again. “I admit from what Sam has told me I am very curious about you, Dean. I wish I knew what parts of you are real and what parts of you Sam just wishes were real. He thinks that you are a hero, Dean. I understand that is a lot of pressure for one man to have on him.”

“It’s really not.” His hands ball into fists at his sides.

Dr. Okoro simply waves away his protests, plowing on. “I simply hope to gain insight onto Sam through you, if you would allow it. You know him better than anyone, yes?”

“Yes.”

“If you would permit me, then,” she smiles a brilliant smile, “to get your side of the story.”

Dean snorts and rolls his eyes sloppily. “The story?” Was that what the kids were calling it these days?

“Whatever you feel is important,” she clarifies quickly, sitting up straighter in her chair so that her spine doesn’t even touch the soft leather of the backrest. “It does not even have to do with Sam directly. Whatever it is you do, whoever it is you are, affects Sam. If it is important to you, it is important to him. Whatever you say will help, I promise.” She implores before catching herself. Visibly, she takes a deep breath and forces herself to lean back, to not crowd Dean in her anticipation. “However, the decision on whether to speak with me or not remains entirely with you. You have no obligations to me.”

He considers her words for a moment- the events in his life that he could share, the joint moments with Sam that he could pass over to her to help her gain more insight. He thinks about how he can be one degree of separation from helping Sam. One fucking degree. Practically a hero. He thinks about how much easier it would be to give blood or a kidney, but no - always the hard way with Sam. 

“Why now?” he rasps after a few tense moments. “After four years, why come to me now?”

She glances down at her lap, dark cheeks flushing darker bashfully as she picks at the grip of her pen with clean fingernails.

“Honestly?” The ‘est’ syllable is tacky on the back of her tongue. “He goes to college soon. For four year I have been trying to treat Sam as if he were…” She pauses for a moment, a lost expression clouding her eyes as she hunts her secondary language for the appropriate vocabulary. “I have treated him as an individual soul,” she says slowly, listening intently to the word on the air for a few intense beats before nodding. Dean shifts uncomfortably in his seat. “I underestimated your relationship. You both are so tangled within one another; I have never seen anything like it before in my life. I cannot know you without knowing Sam, just as I cannot know Sam without knowing you. In a few months he is gone from me. This is my last opportunity. Perhaps a bit unorthodox, but I hope for positive results. Do you understand?”

God help him, he does.

“Just say whatever?” he asks hesitantly, settling more into the stiff leather of the sofa.

“Just say whatever.” She smiles amiably.

Dean exhales harshly and scrubs a calloused palm over his face. His hand smells like leather, motor oil, and Sam. “Jesus, where do I start?”

“At the beginning would be fine.” She uncaps her pen and hovers over the pad of paper in her lap.

Dean takes a shaky breath, smoothing his hands down over his thighs. “Okay. The beginning.”

-

Dean’s four years old when his mother and father bring home a blue blanket with a wrinkly, pink, vaguely humanoid shape inside it. Not that he hadn’t expected it. For the past nine months of his life he had watched his mother’s stomach swell until her belly was like the full moon. He’d sat on the floor with his parents many nights with his ear or his hand pressed against the swell, gasping in delight if something bumped or shifted.

He’d been sitting at the table, swinging his feet back and forth and singing a tuneless song aloud and waiting for his snack when his mother had dropped the bowl of sliced strawberries in the kitchen, clutching that lunar stomach and screaming “John!”

The bowl shattered, sending strawberries rolling across the tile.

That was days ago, though. Dean has barely seen his mother since his father had ushered him to the Grossman’s house next door and asked them if they could look after him for a few hours, please.

His father leads him down to the couch in the family room, asks him if he’s ready to meet the baby as they round the corner and see his mother sitting there, bundle cradled lovingly in her arms. She practically glows as she leans forward so that Dean can see.

Really, Dean had just been expecting… more. It’s pink, fat, motionless, hairless, breathing heavily through wet, parted lips that look too big and too red for its face. Occasionally little twitchy tremors send fat little arms and legs dancing and Dean cringing.

Dean thinks that it’s distinctly ugly, and informs his mother so.

“No,” Mary chastises. “He’s beautiful and he’s your little brother, Dean.”

Dean scrunches up his nose and watches the baby sleep.

“What’s the matter, Dean?” John grins and nudges Dean lightly with his shoulder. “You’re not excited to meet Sammy?”

“Sammy?” Dean repeats. The baby twitches in his sleep and makes a small unconscious sound.

“Look,” Mary whispers as the baby makes more small meaningless sounds, wriggles more perceptibly. “He’s so excited to meet you.”

Dean almost jumps out of his skin when the baby’s eyes slot open into unfocused dark pools.

“Do you want to hold him?” His mother smiles serenely at him and for some unfathomable reason Dean nods his head and agrees to take the pink alien _thing_ into his arms.

John kneels down to Dean’s level to help him position his arms to receive the baby, giving him strict instruction to always support Sammy’s head because he wasn’t strong enough to do it without Dean’s help yet.

“You’ve gotta make sure he’s safe, Dean.” John’s tone is brass and steel. “You’re a big brother now, okay? That’s a big responsibility and I’m trusting you with it. Sam needs you right now. And tomorrow. And the next day. When he starts to walk and talk. And he’ll need you when he starts preschool like you did, remember?”

Dean nods.

“And he’ll need you to teach him how to play. He’ll need you to share your toys- even the trucks. He’ll need you to help him grow up as big and strong as you are. Can you do that for me, big man?”

Dean frowns. Even his trucks?

“Dean?” John intones and Dean nods quickly, promising. John looks him over seriously for a few more moments, causing Dean to wriggle uncomfortably in the face of the speculation, afraid he’s done something wrong and maybe his father was going to take the responsibility away after all before John’s features soften and he motions for Mary to ease the snuffling infant into her first son’s arms.

Dean looks down at the baby and the baby looks up at Dean. Neither is particularly impressed.

“Say hi, Dean,” Mary prompts. “Say hi to your little brother.”

“Hi, Sammy,” Dean whispers down to the bundle in his arms.

The baby blinks slowly at him, mouth twitching downwards at the corner as his brow puckers in the center. He observes the looming figure above him with a harsh, judgmental eye and Dean’s slightly stunned that the baby and his father have so much in common already. His hand twitches, little fingers flexing into a fist.

“He doesn’t like me.” He looks up at his mother, fretting at his lip. “Why doesn’t he like me?”

“He’s only a couple of days old, Dean,” John reminds him soothingly.

“Move a little closer,” Mary suggests. “He can’t see you that far back.”

Hesitantly, Dean ducks closer until his nose bumps against the baby’s, and his face is softer than anything Dean’s ever felt before in his life- even those plush animal books Mrs. Witherford has in the daycare. Dean gasps and the baby starts at the sound.

“Hey, hey, wait, sh,” Dean mumbles quickly as the baby begins to fuss and he starts to rock like he’s seen the moms on television and in the neighborhood do. Steadily, the baby settles and returns to passing his intense judgment on Dean, and Dean waits, wonders what’s going to happen if the infant comes to the conclusion that Dean is a remarkably untrustworthy individual and starts to bawl.

A tiny baby fist strikes Dean’s cheekbone, batting against his cheek lightly before settling on the side of his nose. His fingers uncurl and latch and for the first time Dean realizes that –holy crap- he’s holding a little person. Someday the hand on Dean’s nose is going to as big as Dean’s hands. Someday the hand on Dean’s nose is going to be as big as John’s hand. The dark whorls of hair on his head are going to thicken out. The pink of his skin will dull and tan. His teeth will grow in, his voice will talk and scream and shout and cry, his limbs will stretch out. His hands will get dirty, his shins will get scraped, his bones might even brake.

There is a person in Dean’s arms, and the sheer awe inspired by that notion makes his eyes go wide.

There is a person in Dean’s arms. A person with a future. A person with a personality. A person who is going to live and grieve and laugh and love and-and- one day, in a million, zillion years- maybe do what Mom’s dad did and go to Heaven.

And Dean is going to see it all happen.

“Hi there,” Dean whispers again, mouth rubbing along the perfect soft skin of Sam’s forearm. The thought strikes him that maybe he’s the first person who ever touched that skin. “Hi, Sammy.”

Sam squeals and tugs on Dean’s nose firmly.

“See. He likes you,” Mary laughs softly in Dean’s ear.

“Yeah?” The little fingers continue to flex into the skin on Dean’s nose, tiny fingernails turning white as he yanks, jumping the border between irritation and outright pain. Dean finds that he doesn’t really mind.

“Look at you,” Mary coos down at Sam, wriggles a finger at him to try and catch his attention, but Sam realizes he has another hand that he can try and pry Dean’s nose off with and gives another delighted squeal, ignoring his mother.

Dean laughs and then, encouraged by Sam’s gummy smile, turns to walk away. 

John runs a quick interception, laughing as he snags Sam out of Dean’s arms, barely sparing a moment to disentangle Sam’s hands from Dean’s nostrils. “Maybe someday, buddy. But for right now you can’t hold Sammy without me or your mom around or you could accidentally hurt him, understand?”

He’s singing a different tune six months later when he’s shoving Sam into Dean’s arms and shouting “Take your brother outside as fast as you can! Don’t look back! Now, Dean! Go!”

There’s a fire raging at his back, eating up Sam’s nursery inch by inch.

So Dean runs. He clutches Sam to his chest and tears down the stairs as the smell of smoke clings to his skin and clots his senses to everything but his baby brother’s screaming. He fumbles for one petrifying moment at the bottom of the stairs, bare feet tripping over each other and Sam nearly tips out of his arms before he regained his footing, curling tighter around Sam and whispering apologies as he scrambles out of the front door.

He runs and he runs and he doesn’t look back.

Sammy’s arms flail out as he wriggles restlessly in Dean’s tight grip, his high bawling the only thing that Dean can hear over the roar of the fire and the sound of his own feet slapping against the autumn-cold concrete of the front stoop, sprinting until he comes to a stumbling stop in the middle of the lawn.

That’s where his instructions end.

The orders were to get his brother outside as fast as he could, and he did. A screaming, crying Sam sits cradled in his arms, cloying soot coats his throat, and he has no idea what to do with himself next except to watch his house go up in flames, father and mother somewhere inside.

He scrunches up his little toes in the damp grass and trembles.

“It’s gonna be okay, Sammy,” he mumbles into his little brother’s hair, half reassuring himself. Sam’s chubby fists batter against his chest as he writhes and Dean hushes him, rocks him, remembers to support his head, turns him so that he won’t have to watch with Dean as everything they know goes up in hellfire. “It’s gonna be okay.” He leans down to press his lips to Sam’s forehead and feels them smear against his skin as he whispers, “I got you, everything’s gonna be okay.”

And for a few solid moments as Dean stands on the front lawn of his life he thinks about how this is it. For a few solid minutes, the two of them are orphans in his mind. Dean doesn’t cry. He thinks about how he will later, though. Thinks about how when a grown-up shows up Dean’s job is done and he’ll be allowed. He just holds Sam closer and waits.

He feels so small. So, so small in this great big world next to this great big fire. He’s lost and confused and he wants to scream and throw himself on the ground and beat his fists into the dirt until the earth shatters underneath of him.

But, if he’s small, then what’s Sam?

“I’m here,” Dean’s voice trembles as he leans down because his mom told him that Sam still couldn’t see very well and Dean wants him to see. “I’ll be big for you, Sam. Promise. Okay?

When Dean’s father bursts from the front door his robe flares out behind him like Batman’s cape in Dean’s favorite cartoons and fire seethes and hisses behind him as he swoops down the stoop, Mary clutched tight to his chest, coughing and spluttering in his arms.

Dean holds Sam even closer as his sweat and soot streaked father staggers across the lawn to stand by his son unsteadily, arms shaking with the effort of bodily supporting his wife.

Dean jumps slightly when John drops to his knees next to him, clutching Sam to his chest protectively as his father comes down to his level.

“You okay?” he rasps, voice rough.

“We’re fine.”

There the Winchesters sit on their front lawn, John with Mary in his arms and Dean with Sam in his, and they watch their house burn until the fire engines round the corner and usher them to the side so they can douse the flames.

The neighbors stand passively on the street in groups of fours and fives by the time the ambulance comes to a screaming halt next to The Winchester’s, whispering and tittering about the latest tragedy to strike their community, no doubt organizing who was going to bake what casserole on which days to feed the Winchester family for the next few weeks as the four of them are lead towards the cabin of the truck by EMTs.

A tall man with a soft, round face tries to ease the baby out of Dean’s arms, assuring John and Mary that he needs to check the infant’s respiration.

Dean bites him hard enough to leave little half-moon bruises when they can pry him off and it takes John and Mary’s combined efforts and the blow by blow explanation of what procedures are necessary to make sure Sam’s really okay for him to calm down enough to get his own lungs checked.

Later in the week, after the black’s been scraped from the walls and the broken windows are boarded up, Dean overhears his parents talking about the short in the half-moon night-light in Sammy’s nursery that sparked and ignited the drawn curtains. Dean lies still in his bed, pretending to be asleep and pretending that the entire upper floor doesn’t smell like soot and char.

When he does finally get to sleep that night the nightmares of Sam screaming and being eaten up by surging flames until nothing but ashes and black smears remain have him kicking himself out of his own bed to pad down the hall and sneak into his parent’s room. It takes him fifteen minutes to figure out how to flip the latch in the dark the first night.

Sam fusses slightly as Dean slides onto the thick mat of the crib beside him. The smell of baby powder and Sam all around him soothes the raw spot in the center of his chest where the nightmares come from.

“Sh,” Dean croons gently as he curls around Sam, resting his hand lightly over Sam’s little chest to feel his steady heartbeat. “I’m here, Sam.”

Sam curls his hand around Dean’s thumb and, after a few light huffs, falls back asleep pressed warm against Dean’s chest.

-

When the phone sitting on the wide dark wood desk tucked into the corner of the room rings, it rings loud and proud; shrill and destructive to the steady lilt of Dean’s voice on the air.

Zora’s up out of her chair before Dean can blink himself out of his memories, ditching her pad on the table as she scrambles to control the environment. “I am so sorry about this, please let me turn that off,” she apologizes quickly as she jolts across the room. “Nolan,” she hisses her secretary’s name into the receiver. “I am with a patient.”

Dean baulks at being called a patient, indignant hackles rising. He’s here because she had asked him to come. He’s here because of Sam. Not because there’s something wrong with him, not because he needs help- because Sam does.

The black smudges of slanted ink scrawl caught Dean’s eye, stark against the yellow of the legal pad. He hardly hesitates before reading it upside down.

‘ _Qualifies ‘beginning’ as being introduced to Sam. Review notes on Sam’s earlier memories being majorly related to his brother_

_‘Physical assault on an authority figure at age four— review notes on Gambol, potential mirroring_

_‘Shared a bed starting near infancy. Earlier than Sam had indicated. Review notes.’_

He snatches up the legal pad, flips it and reads it over again.

“Reschedule,” Dr. Okora commands severely into the phone, rocking anxiously back and forth on her feet as she itches to apologize again for the interruption and get back to the matter at hand. “We spoke of this earlier, Nolan. I am busy through today.” She pauses, weighs the response. “Yes, even the afternoon appointments. This should have been done a week ago.”

The phone clatters loudly as she drops it back into the cradle and turns back towards the young man on her couch, who is sitting quietly, reclined and subdued save for the nervous bouncing of his knee. The legal pad sits on the table, askew.

“I apologize,” Zora clears her throat and takes her seat. Dean gives her a sour look as she plucks up her pen again and settles. “You were speaking of Sam’s infancy, yes?”

“Yeah.” Dean’s slow to relax back into the sofa. “He was a loud baby. I guess I spent a lot of time with him after the fire. The kids at school kept telling me that if I was gonna keep hanging out with a baby instead of them that they didn’t want to be my friends anymore.” A brief smile touches the corner of his lip, ghosting across his features.

“So?” Dr. Okoro prompts.

“So what?” Dean snorts, rolls his eyes again. “They were just kids I knew. Sam’s my brother.”

She subtly scribbles something down and Dean itches to snatch the pad away from her and read it.

“Is there anything else you can tell me?” she asks before he gives in to the impulse.

“Like what?” he chuffs.

“Anything.” She smiles again, wide and comforting. Like the way his mother used to smile. “Anything you can think of that sticks out.”

Dean chews on the inside of his lip. He can think of three off the top of his head.

-

“Sam! Stop!” Dean’s fourteen and he’s got one hand knotted in Sam’s short hair as he dodges his younger brother’s flailing elbows, knees him in the back of the thigh in retaliation. “Just lemme-” He jams his fingers into Sam’s mouth only to have teeth clamp down into his knuckles with bruising force. “Ow! God, Sam!”

“Get _off!_ ” Sam shouts, writhing underneath Dean on the bathroom floor. “Dean, stop! I’m gonna tell Dad, I swear I will!” He kicks out again with the one leg he’s not using to try and get under himself for leverage and misses Dean by a mile, catches the corner of the bathtub instead and sends the bottles of shampoo and body wash tumbling, clattering loudly in the enclosed space to mingle on the floor with the shattered bits of the porcelain soap holder that he already knocked off the sink. The pale blue bathmat carpet is rucked up underneath him from the struggle, bunched up to his ribs with his shirt to expose the bruises that Dean had already pinched into his sides at the beginning of this entire debacle.

“If you’d just quit being such a baby and hold still this wouldn’t be a problem!” Dean snaps back, dropping his full weight down on his younger brother to keep him from crawling to the door, effectively crushing Sam’s knee underneath their combined weight. He ducks Sam’s sloppy blind punch. “Just open up!”

Sam’s breath wheezes out of his lungs in short, harsh pants as his hands scrabble against the tile floor, hunting for purchase. “No!” he grits out from between clenched teeth.

“Don’t make me hurt you,” Dean warns, tone on the bridge between threatening and sympathetic.

“Let me go!” Sam mule-kicks again and something else clatters to the floor.

“I warned you.” Dean sighs once dramatically before he’s face down in Sam’s back, biting hard into the meat of his shoulder.

“Ah!” Sam yowls, neck arching back and Dean takes advantage of the moment to reach up and wrench out the loose tooth Sam had been complaining about for over a week.

Dean laughs when he removes his jaws from Sam’s shoulder, and he keeps laughing even after Sam lands an elbow to his nose and bucks him off into the bathtub.

“That hurt, you big jerk!” Sam sniffs as he straightens himself out. His face is blotchy red from screaming and crying, his wide eyes pathetically big and wet and his bloody pink lips downturned in a frown.

“Yeah,” Dean concedes, readjusting himself so that his legs dangle out of the edge of the tub. “But does it still hurt now?”

Sam tongues at the gap in his smile, teeth stained orange and tongue candy-stripe red. “I guess not.”

“See.” Dean leans back against the tile wall. “What did I tell you?”

“What if it doesn’t grow back?” Sam frets.

“It’ll grow back,” Dean assures quickly. “It’s just a baby tooth, Sammy. I lost mine when I was your age, too, remember? Your big kid teeth are gonna grow in real soon, promise.”

Sam sniffs again and wrings his hands into the hem of his shirt. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.” Dean reaches out and snags Sam’s shoulder to tug him into the bathtub with him, tucking him close under his arm before he holds up the tooth for Sam to inspect. “Pretty cool, right? That was in your face a couple of minutes ago.” 

“That’s gross.” Sam scrunches up his nose in disgust but still takes the tooth from Dean. He turns it over in his palm, weighs it.

“You think you’re gonna get a lot money from the tooth fairy?” Dean tugs teasingly on Sam’s earlobe.

“Stop.” Sam bats away his hand and laughs into his shoulder. “The tooth fairy’s not real, Dean.”

“What?” Dean gasps with mock affront. “The tooth fairy’s not real?” Sam giggles harder as Dean’s fingers dance along his ribs, pressing in the tender spots that have Sam wriggling and laughing all over again. “Why did no one tell me? Who leaves money under my pillow then, huh, Sammy?”

“Dad does, dummy.” Sam scoffs and digs his bony fingers into Dean’s ribs.

Dean pulls a face. “Are you trying to tell me that Dad’s the tooth fairy?”

Sam crushes himself into Dean’s side and laughs until he’s shaking with it and Dean laughs too because he’s pretty sure Sam’s laugh is the best sound in the whole world.

Sam’s laughter tapers off eventually but he stays curled up underneath the heavy weight of Dean’s arm, face half pressed into the place where the joint of his shoulder slopes into his chest, just breathing as he rolls the tooth around in his fingers. Dean’s hand is resting just underneath his ribs so he can feel the steady rise and fall of his breathing as his body-warm t-shirt rises to fill his palm and then sinks away in a steady rhythm. Sam sighs a warm puff against his collarbone and they sit together in the bathtub for a few silent moments, just breathing together with the edge of the bathtub digging painfully into Dean’s spine and his hand going numb as the press of Sam’s head cuts off his circulation.

He thinks about how weird this should be. He thinks about Matt who lives down the street and his younger brother, Colin. Matt and Dean are the same age, in the same grade, used to be in the same class. Colin’s a year younger than Sam but Sam still goes out of his way to be nice to him, but Sam goes out of his way to be nice to everyone. He thinks about how Matt probably never pulled Colin’s tooth. He thinks about how Matt wouldn’t be caught dead sitting in a bathtub with Colin tucked securely under his arm. Then again, Matt’s probably never pulled Colin out of a fire. He’s never slept curled around him because he was afraid his younger brother was going to stop breathing in the middle of the night if he wasn’t there to show him how. He’s never had anyone say, “Watch out for your little brother,” and taken that notion truly to heart.

Dean’s not sure who that makes more messed up: him or Matt.

“What are you two doing?” Dean and Sam both jump as the door swings inward, knocking against Sam’s suspended bare foot in the process, and their mother pokes her head in.

“Mom!” Sam’s up and out from underneath Dean’s arm before Mary can really register what’s happened to her bathroom. “Mom, look! Dean pulled my tooth for me! Isn’t that the coolest?”

Mary smiles and makes a ‘WOW’ face as she tries not to grimace noticeably at Sam’s bloody smile.

Dean stifles a laugh into the crook of his elbow and Sam shoots him a grin over his shoulder.

-

Dean’s fifteen and he’s crouched over a small fire pit in the middle of East Jesus, Nowhere, grumbling under his breath about having to be on fire starting duty for another one of his Dad’s camping trips. Normally Dean’s all for the spontaneous trips, even if they sometimes include John kicking open the door to his and Sam’s rooms at four in the morning and flipping their mattresses so that they sprawl across the floor in a heap of limbs and half-garbled complaints before he tells them he wants them up, dressed, fed, and packed before the sun hits the horizon or there’s going to be a reckoning.

Dean figures it has something to do with John’s stint in the Marines, so he doesn’t begrudge his father these quirks the way Sam does. Dean genuinely enjoys camping.

He likes the freedom. He likes that there’s no walls and no people watching him. He likes the sun on his back and the leaves in his hair. He likes the lack of rules. He likes that he has Sam a tent’s worth of space away at all times.

Or he would have liked to have Sam a tent’s worth of space away at all times if his father hadn’t insisted that his youngest child learn how to fly fish today.

“Because, y’know, that’s a valuable fucking skill to have,” Dean grouses petulantly as he piles wood high, foul teenage mouth working overtime. “I don’t see why he couldn’t take me along, too.” He pats down his pockets before remembering that John swiped his lighter before they left.

Rolling his eyes, he turns to root through the duffle at his back for a glass bottle empty enough for him to drain the contents and then smash to use the base as a make-shift magnifying glass to channel sunlight. For a moment he thinks of the beginning of _2001: A Space Odyssey,_ only instead of a caveman gripping a femur and striking at a pile of bones as triumphant music plays, he pictures himself wielding an empty Coke bottle up to the sky and crowing victory as a small tuft of grass and sticks catch aflame. 

“When the hell in my life am I going to have to use these survival skills?” he continues to grumble as he skips over a few plastic bottles he’ll have to resort to if absolutely necessary. “I don’t plan on getting stranded in the woods any time soon. Ever, actually. I don’t plan on ever getting stranded in the woods. And if I did I’d sure as hell have my lighter on me.” He gives the bag a rough kick and irritably wonders when Dad and Sam are going to be back.

Later on, when he’s sitting in a stiff plastic chair in the emergency room with blood all over his hands, he’ll wonder if he would have heard John shouting his name earlier if he hadn’t been complaining to himself.

“Dean!” John’s voice is thunder and rain, just like it’s always been as far as Dean can remember. When he used to consider such things, he’d always imagined that God had his father’s voice. Deep and commanding and demanding respect while still holding the capacity for tenderness. It’s the voice that told Dean fantastical stories when he couldn’t sleep, that reprimanded him when he broke the rules of the household, soothed him when he threw tantrums, complimented and critiqued him all of his life. He thought he’d heard every tone and lilt his father had.

He’d never heard his father frantic. Honestly, he didn’t think he was capable. 

“Dean!” John barks again, anxious and harsh as he jostles Sam forward, half carrying and half dragging his youngest with the one hand he isn’t using to press his own wadded up flannel shirt against the back of Sam’s neck.

“What happened?” Dean knocks over his carefully stacked wood in his scramble to get to Sam’s side.

“Fly fishing is stupid!” Sam shouts out louder than necessary, hands trembling as he grips his father’s arm.

“He caught the back of his head with the hook on the back stroke,” John explains quickly. “He’s gonna need some stitches.”

“I don’t _want_ stitches!” Sam shouts again, but his eyelids are drooping and Dean’s not sure if Sam really knows what he’s saying anymore or if he’s just automatically disagreeing with anything their father says.

“Yeah, Sammy, I know,” John soothes as he walks him towards the barely cleared trail that they followed up to the campsite, gesturing at Dean to take over staunching the blood flow for him. Leaves and sticks crunch under his massive boots as he leads the way. “They’re gonna give you some great painkillers at the hospital and then you won’t mind so much, okay?”

“Don’t _want_ to go to the hospital!” Sam kneads at his eyes. Dean slips his hand under his father’s and feels the fabrics squish and run rivulets his brother’s blood down his wrist as he presses hard. Sam’s hair is plastered to the back of his neck with it and his t-shirt is sticky and stained all the way down to the small of his back. Dean’s not sure if it’s Sam’s shoulders that are shaking or his hand when he grips hard into the bone there to help guide Sam down the uneven path. Sam’s breathing is harsh and uneven as he tightens his fingers into John’s palms as he guides him forwards.

It takes fifteen minutes to walk Sam, stumbling and crying, down to the Impala.

“We’ll come back for the equipment,” John grunts as he hassles his sons into the backseat. “Get him face down. Keep him talking.” 

The leather of the backseat is warm and accepting as Dean sinks down into it, sun baked and smelling like everything he thinks of as home. He pulls Sam into his chest, presses his face into his shoulder so he can keep one hand on the tacky red stained over-shirt to the back of his head.

The engine jumps to life and rattles the air out of Dean’s lungs.

“Dean,” Sam murmurs as he clutches at Dean’s shirt, clings to anything he can twist his fingers into in his hunt for comfort and safety.

“I’m here, Sammy,” Dean assures him gently. “You really did a number on yourself there, huh?” He laughs roughly and Sam curls up tighter and whimpers, practically in Dean’s lap. He twines his arms awkwardly around Dean’s neck, clutching and sniffling pathetically into the sweaty slope of his neck, forehead slipping as he presses forward as hard as he can. For a moment Dean entertains the crazy thought that Sam’s trying to crawl inside of him. Sam’s trying to phase through his skin and curl up under his ribs where he’d be free from blood and pain.

He scoffs and cradles Sam closer.

If he thought it would work, he’d be tempted to try. 

Following some impulse he can’t trace, Dean pries up a corner of the soaked-through cloth that stains his fingers and glances at the damage.

The gouge is jagged and long, curving along from the base of Sam’s skull to behind his ear. It’s wide and dark and wet like a canyon at midnight and Dean wants to throw up looking at it.

Twenty six stitches and a prescription of Lorcet later they’re back in the backseat of the Impala and Sam’s head is pillowed on Dean’s thigh, gauze-side up. Dean feels like he’s run a marathon when he hasn’t done anything but sit in the waiting room and glare subtly at the back of his pacing father’s head.

It scars.

Sam grows out his hair, starts wearing it long.

-

Dean’s seventeen and he should be sitting in the back of the Impala that his father gave him with Jackie Reid straddling his hips as he palms her through her shirt and asks her if she’s sure she wants to be seen with leather jacket wearing, motorcycle boot stomping, womanizing Dean Winchester. Instead he’s standing in the center of a field in the exact center of Bumfuck with a box of fireworks under one arm and Sam under the other.

Sam’s beaming up at him, practically glowing as adoration seeps from his every pore and Dean finds that he doesn’t miss Jackie Reid all that much.

“C’mon, Dean!” Sam grins and tugs on his hand. Dean stumbles after him, laughing as he fishes his lighter out of his pocket.

The sky lights up brighter than a carnival, brighter than what heaven’s supposed to be when Sam sparks the fuse and lights the world on fire.

They whoop and holler and dance in the sparks and thundering booms and Dean wonders if they could start their own world like this, each explosion scattering stars across the universe and birthing constellations and worlds that no one but them can see.

Dean falls back into the dry tall grass that crinkles and breaks underneath him, laughing so hard he can’t breathe. Tears of mirth glitter on his face in the starbursts of light high above him. Sam falls into the grass next to him, howling with delighted laughter.

They settle eventually, long after they could tell the difference between sparks and stars in the night sky. They lay there, panting and smiling in the grass, arms outstretched so that, if either of them felt inclined to reach the last few inches, they could tangle fingers and hold on forever.

It’s almost dawn when they pack up and go home.

-

The clock continues to _tick, tick, tick_ in the silence and Dean wrings his hands together uncomfortably.

Dr. Okoro waits a full few moments to make sure that he’s finished his thought before asking gently, “Why do you think you picked those memories?”

“I don’t know,” Dean scoffs as he leans back against the sofa, one hand scrubbing through his short hair irritably. “I mean the fish hook story’s a doozy. I used to tell it to Sammy’s dates when he brought them home, try and make them rethink dating a doofus.”

“Did you ever tell that story to Charlie?” Dr. Okoro asks, unintentionally stubbing out the ‘th’ in ‘that’ with her tongue.

Dean tenses. “I don’t want to talk about Charlie.”

“Fair enough,” she relents, holding her hands. “We do not have to speak about Charlie if you do not wish.”

“I do not wish,” Dean snorts back, pronouncing it ‘Ah dew naht weesh’, dragging his vowels through the mud and around corners to mock her accent.

For a split second that Dean can see her eyes darken and a short flash of hurt twitches in her brow, and for that moment Dean’s sure that he’s finally done it; he’s pushed her too far by finding the chink in her armor where her insecurities about her second language lay and she’s going to chuck him out and he’ll have lost the chance to get back everything he’s lost and broken. She collects herself, takes a deep breath, and scribbles something down on her yellow legal pad.

Dean clenches his teeth.

“Is there something you would like to say to me, Dean?” she asks without looking up from what she’s writing.

He opens his mouth and, “I knew it was coming,” falls out.

She almost flinches and looks up at him through her glasses, eyes wide as she meddles out what he means. The clouds are rolling in on the horizon. The sunlight doesn’t catch in her hair anymore.

“I knew it was coming,” he repeats. The words taste like spoiled milk. ‘It’ is a big, big word on his tongue and neither of them has any illusion about what he’s talking about. “I knew he was going to do something.” He figures if Dr. Okoro knows them as well as she thinks she knows them she would have guessed that Dean had at least an inkling. “The night before.”  
  



	2. Part 2

  


  
  
No one really knows the catalyst of it, but one morning when he’s thirteen Sam wakes up spitting vinegar; there’s gravel in his gut and spit in his eye and he’s got a bone to pick with the whole damn world. Suddenly, nights that he used to spend knotted up with Dean on the couch quoting Clint Eastwood movies all the way through turn into nights Dean spends by himself pressed against his bedroom door listening to John and Sam scream themselves hoarse.

If Dean didn’t know any better he’d say Sam was intentionally picking fights with the only person just as jackass stubborn as he is just to justify being angry all the time.

Maybe Dean doesn’t know any better.

And maybe he’s been too busy splitting his time between making himself bona fide infamous among the parents of teenage girls all across the county and dominating the vast majority of Sam’s schedule, but Dean doesn’t really notice that Sam doesn’t have a whole lot of friends until they’re both in high school together. Sure, Sam has people he smiles at in the hallways and girls who are obviously interested in being a little bit more than just friends, but Sam doesn’t seem attracted. But Sam makes straight A’s and he dominates track, swimming, and soccer with a single-minded intensity that puts Dean’s baseball career to shame, so Dean’s not all that worried about it.

The kid’s too busy.

He’s too busy for everyone else, that is.

Sam goes home every afternoon sitting co-captain in the Impala and does his homework while Dean makes dinner for them because their parents work late weekdays.

Dean realizes he should feel bad about hogging the world’s Sam-time, but mostly he just feels smug. Sam used to pass out smiles like candy on Halloween, but now they’re just for him. 

Dean’s not sure what exactly he did in a past life to deserve safe lodging in the eye of the storm during Hurricane Sam, and he’s not exactly sure what he did in this one to deserve Sam looking at him like he’s the sun and stars while he glares down at the rest of the world, but he’s damn sure glad he did it. 

The point is that if anyone other than Dean had walked in the front door to be greeted with the crackle of butter in the bottom of a skillet competing with the low hum of Sam singing along with the radio it would have been considered a rare, delicate gift of a good mood. Hell, it would have been considered a rare, delicate gift of _Sam_ at all.

For Dean it was just Thursday.

“Sam?” he calls as he shrugs off his jacket in the front hall.

Sam’s shaggy head of hair pokes out of the doorway, grinning brilliantly. “Hey! Mom called.”

“Yeah?” Dean smiles faintly as he hooks his leather coat on the rack tacked firmly to the wall.

“Yeah.” Sam shoots him one last blinding smile before ducking back into the kitchen, only his voice trailing after him for Dean to follow. “She said that Ms. Theresa asked her to help out for a couple of hours at the daycare, so she’s gonna be home later than usual.”

Dean hums an affirmative noise in his throat.

All the windows in the kitchen and family room are thrown open wide, letting in the intense afternoon sunlight in concentrated segments that throw the dust motes that float lazily through the air into sharp definition. The crisp smell of oncoming spring that mingles with the aroma of the tomato soup simmering on the stove and the grilled cheese sandwich that Sam is sliding off the buttered pan onto a stack that’s already four sandwiches high.

“Good day at school?” Dean smiles as he swipes a sandwich. He doesn’t have to tell Sam that grilled cheese and tomato soup is his favorite.

Sam shrugs and slips him a small grin. “I got my _To Kill A Mockingbird_ essay back.”

“Yeah?” Dean takes a seat, props his elbows up on the counter and settles himself down for the long haul. “Man, I love that book. Atticus Finch is the shit. What’d you get?”

Sam snorts and rolls his eyes. “Ninety seven.”

“Not a hundred?” Dean tuts teasingly.

“Mrs. Nash said I get too wordy sometimes.” He pulls a ‘what can you do’ face and shrugs as he slices off another pat of butter that hits the bottom of the hot skillet with a hiss. The two of them fall into a comfortable silence for a few moments. Sam works his way around the kitchen, filling a cup of soup and passing it over to Dean as he chews contentedly. The wind chime on the porch that’s been there since before Dean was born plays them a tune that competes with the radio when a breeze that smells like damp leaves rustles by and Dean thinks that maybe he could live in this moment forever, with the sunlight swimming around the two of them in a comfortable kitchen.

Sam catches his eye and shoots him a little lopsided smile as he flips the sandwich in the pan, toasty side up. Dean dips a corner of the sandwich into the soup, earning a soft, amused sniff from his brother, but doesn’t say anything. Sam takes up humming again to the song on the radio.

Dean snorts. “ _The Beatles_? Really, man?”

Sam’s tongue is a pink flash when he pokes it out, pulling it back in quickly so he can catch the lyrics when they start back up, belting off-key and out of tune, “ _Father Mckenzie writing the words for a sermon that no one will hear! No one comes near!”_

Dean laughs and lurches for the radio, flipping it quickly to the classic rock station and _The Who_ comes blasting forth like a ruptured dam. “ _I don’t need to fight to prove I’m right! I don’t need to be forgiven!”_

Sam elbows him in the solar plexus, earning a harsh grunt before he switches the radio back to the original station.

Dean shoulders him out of the way roughly, flicking the station back again.

Sam punches him hard in the side, sets it back.

_-Ah, look at all the lonely people!_

Dean smashes Sam’s face into his armpit and wrenches the radio dial.

_-Don’t cry. Don’t shed a tear._

The grilled cheese sandwich is burning in the skillet and Sam pinches the tender part of Dean’s underarm to get free and flip the station.

_-Where do they all come from?_

Dean hip-checks him out of the way.

_-Teenage wasteland!_

The power chord gets yanked out of the wall in the scuffle when Sam tries to dive for it again and the lyrics cut out suddenly.

“Ow! Fuck!” Sam shouts aloud as he’s bodily tackled to the ground. The protrusions of his spine hit the tile floor hard and stay squashed there when Dean sits on his stomach. “Get off me, asshole!” He scrabbles for purchase in the grout as Dean pins him. They tussle for a moment, so used to play fighting one another it’s rehearsed and practically perfected.

Maybe it should freak Dean out that even fighting with Sam is as natural as breathing.

“Not until you admit Keith Moon could kick Ringo Starr’s ass!” Dean crows, valiantly not yelping when Sam finds a good spot his on his bicep to lay his fist into repeatedly, hard enough that Dean can feel the tremors of the rapid-fire punches tingling in the webbing of his fingers.

“They’re not _cage fighting_ , Dean!” Sam wheezes under the six feet of eighteen-year-old weighing on his lungs. He tries to knee his older brother in the small of the back to gain some leverage but only really succeeds in rucking Dean’s shirt up to his ribcage.

“Yeah, but if they were!” He catches Sam’s hand trying to snake around his neck and bites down onto his thumb to discourage that train of thought.

Sam yelps and wings out with his other elbow violently on instinct, accidentally dislodging himself from underneath his elder brother’s ass and Dean flips over quickly to compensate, laughing at the muffled “Oomph!” Sam rattles out when Dean belly-flops onto his back.

“Get off ‘a me, you freak!” Sam barks, voice airy because his lungs aren’t getting the daily recommended amount of oxygen. He strikes out, palms connecting with the dark wood cabinets that line the underside of the counters all around them with a loud _smack_ and he shoves backwards in a desperate attempt to throw Dean off balance. The hem of his t-shirt gets caught up between his stomach and the rough network of grout underneath him, hitching up around his shoulders as he writhes and refuses to be pinned even as Dean shouts his demands for unconditional surrender in their rough-housing.

“That’s cheating!” Dean lunges forward to catch Sam’s wrists, pinning them to the ground.

He doesn’t realize until Sam freezes what a compromising position he’s put them in. He’s got one knee shoved up high between Sam’s legs, forcing the curve of his ass to ride along Dean’s thigh when he struggles; Dean’s shirt is up around his armpits, leaving his stomach exposed to the warm skin of Sam’s back; and his arms bracket Sam’s up and up and up to where Dean’s taken the liberty of linking their fingers and pressing Sam’s palms into the cold tile underneath him. Dean can feel Sam’s heartbeat rabbit-footing around inside of his ribcage and it reverberates through him.

Sam’s a statue underneath him, so still and cold that if Dean couldn’t feel his heart thundering through both of their chests he would have thought he was legitimately petrified.

“Dean,” Sam says, completely dead serious this time around and Dean doesn’t think that he’s ever heard that tone directed at himself before. “Dean, get off.” He’s trembling.

Dean’s lost something in this situation, he’s just not really sure what.

“Dean!” Sam’s breathing hard and sharp now and he moves his hips in an aborted buck as if he thought twice about trying to throw Dean off halfway through the action. “Dean! Get off me!” His voice is high and tight with panic and Dean scrambles to put some space between them.

Dean’s back hits the cabinets and Sam’s already tripping over himself to get away, shoulders hunched as he pulls his t-shirt down his thighs, and Dean is so god damned confused about what just happened between them that he can’t breathe.

“Sam, what the hell?” he shouts and stumbles to follow.

“Leave me alone,” Sam snaps over his shoulder as he gains momentum up the stairs. His neck is red and splotchy like it only gets when he’s holding back tears. “Just leave me the hell alone!”

“Sammy, c’mon!” Dean’s a half step behind him, practically breathless with confusion. He reaches out with a comforting hand to grab Sam’s elbow.

Sam pivots hard and heavy, face contorted into a mask of rage as he puts all of his weight behind his fist before he puts it in his brother’s face.

“Jesus!” Dean clutches his nose around the brilliant starbursts of pain and stumbles down a few steps as he reels, losing the sounds of Sam thundering up the stairs to the rush of blood in his ears.

“Don’t fucking touch me!” Sam screams before slamming his door closed and locking it.

“You little bitch!” Dean shouts back, feeling up the bridge of his nose to check for breaks, smearing blood as he goes. “You know what, Sam? Fine. Whatever! Get back to me when you’re off the rag!”

He sits heavily on the bottom step and lets his nose throb and bleed while he waits for Sam to cool down and come ask him if he did any damage to his face before fixing him an ice pack so that they can sit down to watch _The Searchers_ together until Dean forgets to be petulant long enough that he can tell Sam for the thousandth time the story of how Natalie Wood died, and then later, when Sam’s half asleep on his shoulder, he’ll be able to coax out what exactly went wrong here.

Sam doesn’t come.

Dean has to scrape the burnt grilled cheese sandwich off the pan. His blood boils and he curses Sam under his breath as he cleans, muttering around the metallic taste clinging to his sinuses.

For fourteen years they’ve practically worshipped one another and then Sam has the audacity to pull this shit. For fourteen years Sam’s looked at Dean like the sun shines out of his ass and he has the fucking gall to treat him like-

Like-

Everyone else.

Dean breaks the soup mug when he throws it into the sink, thick red tomato soup spattering everywhere.

He’s in bed before John gets home and he swears he can hear sobbing from the other side of the wall.

He rolls over.

Fuck Sam anyways.

-

He wakes up late the next morning, alarm blaring in his ear and his mother knocking at his door.

“Hey, sorry,” he grunts when he shuffles out his bedroom door, pulling a clean shirt over his head as he goes, vaguely wondering how many people are going to notice that he slept in his jeans last night. “Slept through my alarm.” He stretches out, reaching up for the ceiling and arching his back in a hunt for some relief from the dull, achy throb thrumming bone-deep through his entire body. His head feels like a balloon about to pop, rubber stretched so thin and tight it’s all but transparent.

“Breakfast’s on the table,” Mary explains as she combs her fingers through his hair in a quick attempt to tame the wild cowlick on the back of his head before he runs downstairs. “Sam says that he’s not feeling well, so I’m gonna call him in. Keep your phone on you just in case, okay?”

Dean snorts bitterly. “Yeah, okay.”

“Sweetie, what happened to your nose?” 

He brushes her off when she tries to turn his chin to get a better look at the purplish bruise that leaks from the edge of his nostril to pool up underneath his eye. “Don’t worry about it, Mom. It’s nothing.”

He’s halfway downstairs before she can think to say anything else. He stuffs his phone in his pocket on his way out the door. The curtains in Sam’s bedroom window shift as he jams his keys into the Impala’s lock but he ignores it petulantly. 

The engine rumbles to life and the curtains close.

-

First block auto shop gives Dean some time to unwind under the hood of the communal junker, elbow-deep in grease and working parts of things that he knows for sure how to fix when they break. It’s therapeutic, actually. The old silver Chevy coughs and hacks like an asthmatic ninety-year-old when Dean finally gets the engine to turn over, but she functions. Dean can tune her up and smooth her out later, the point is that there’s still something left in the old grey ghost and Dean’s determined to find it and fan it back to life.

“Good job, Winchester.” Mr. Tiernan puts a heavy hand on Dean’s shoulder and Dean beams until the bell rings and he has to wash up and trek out to Statistics.

-

“You’re late, Dean,” Mrs. Hansen snaps when he slips in through the door and slaps a quiz down on his desk. He rolls his eyes and slinks to his seat without mentioning the fact that if he showed up to class on time she’d probably die of shock. “Whenever you feel up to it,” she snips when he stares at the numbers and symbols on the blank sheet for a few moments without picking up his pencil.

Dean heaves a sigh and reaches for his pencil. Mrs. Hansen nods once, satisfied, before turning away to leave him to it.

The entire room is stuffy with the sounds of graphite scratching and calculators working spliced with the occasional cough or sniff. The sound of the cellphone vibrating in Dean’s pocket slices through the shuffle and he shoves his hand in his jacket quickly to stifle it, shot of adrenaline rocketing through him as he look around furtively to make sure no one noticed.

Heads remain bent. Mrs. Hansen flips another page in her book. All’s well.

“The hell could you possibly need right now, Sam?” Dean grouses under his breath and fishes out the bulky Nokia from the depths of his pocket and flips it open under the desk, glancing down to read the text.

The world fades into static.

_Mom:_

_I’m coming to pick you up. Sam tried to kill himself._

The temperature in the room drops into the negatives, but Dean still sweats through his t-shirt in three seconds flat. Everything is roaring white noise in his ears as he reads the eleven words over again because no. This doesn’t make sense. Those words can’t go together in that order.

No, Dean thinks.

No, he thinks again. Hell, he may even say it aloud for all he knows. The word rolls over in his mind in one continuous thread that gains mass and momentum the faster he repeats it but he can’t stop because it’s the only word that makes any sense anymore.

The universe is tilting to the left and the globe is rolling and Dean feels so stupid because he can’t even keep track of any of it because he still can’t read the fucking text his mother just sent him correctly, why can’t anyone give him a god damn break while he reboots?

“Dean!”

He nearly has a seizure he startles so violently.

Mrs. Hansen looms over him. The heavy lights cast harsh shadows over her brow and she looks practically demonic when she growls “You know I have a very strict policy against cell phones, Dean,” and extends her palm out to him.

Dean blinks at her. She doesn’t seem to have realized that every neuron and receptor he possessed has gone leaking out of his ears and the only thing keeping him tethered to reality is the cellphone clutched so tightly in his fingers that they’re starting to numb.

“Dean!” Mrs. Hansen intones.

Dean tries to kick-start basic motor functions but his mind turns over and then stalls out again, spluttering exhaust fumes that make him nauseous.

Mrs. Hansen scoffs and then, apparently fed up with Dean just staring at her, makes to pry the phone out of his hand.

His ignition system triggers and his starter motor coughs, spark plugs firing, pistons turning cylinders, air and fuel pumping and Dean is up and out of his seat, jostling desks and chairs and staring students out of his fucking way.

Mrs. Hansen shouts something after him but Dean can’t hear her as he hits the hallway like a bat out of hell. Ice wedges between the disks of his spine when he fishtails on the slick tiles of the hallway and he doesn’t realize until he hits the ground just how damn hard he’s breathing that he can’t even compensate when the wind is knocked out of him. He scrambles up, gasping and cussing up a blue streak as he locates which direction ‘up’ is and its relationship with ‘down’.

The world’s in bright technicolors and Dean’s eyes hurt just from being open. His head is spinning, his lungs are on fire, he’s pretty sure he’s about to paint the white tile with the insides of his stomach and he’s flirting with a panic attack.

All of this pales in comparison to the idea- the thought that Sammy-

God, he’d been so upset yesterday. But Dean never thought that Sam would ever-

Didn’t think that Sam would even consider-

Dean’s knees buckle but he pulls himself together and sprints the rest of the way to the main office.

“Oh my god,” the receptionist blurts when he lurches through the main door to the office. She’s an older woman, rounded in matronly places with too much rouge and too much lavender perfume that makes Dean want to gag from sensory overload. “Sweetie, are you okay?”

Dean licks his lips feverishly, but doesn’t answer. “My mom- my mom’s supposed to be coming to pick me up.” 

“Yeah,” she says slowly before turning back to her computer, not even asking Dean for his pass. “Last name, honey?”

“Winchester,” Dean pants. “Like the rifle.”

“Oh,” she chirps as she checks him out. “You must be Sam’s brother! He runs errands for the office during his free period. He’s in here all the time. Such a sweetheart. I haven’t seen him around today, though. He doing alright?”

Dean is absolutely positive that his knees are going to give out and he’s going to vomit all over the grungy blue office carpet for a second.

“Dean!”

Dean turns heel and before he can ever really register what changes are happening in the world around him he’s surrounded in the touch and smell of his mother. Her thin arms brace across his back and he squeezes back for everything that he’s worth.

“Momma.” He buries his nose in her neck and clings like he hasn’t since when he broke his arm in second grade and she stayed in the hospital with him while people he didn’t know saying words he didn’t understand loomed over him.

Mary trembles for a moment before turning him loose and holding him at an arm’s length. She looks old, Dean realizes; older than he’s ever seen her in his life. She pulled her hair back into a bun at some point but its sloppy now with entire chunks of her beautiful hair having come loose like she was pulling at it. She tries to smile for him but it comes out brittle.

“C’mon.” She takes his hand. “Your father’s at the hospital.”

The ‘with Sam’ goes unspoken.  
  



	3. Part 3

  


  
  
They find John sitting in a stiff hospital chair with a straight spine and steely eyes like he’s on patrol rather than sitting next to his unconscious son. He looks a million years old. The entire front of his shirt is clingy and damp like someone slugged a soaking wet towel at him and he couldn’t quite catch it before it slapped to his chest and sludged water all the way down to his knees.

“He’ll be fine,” John says before Dean can even take the breath to ask. Rough callouses on his mechanic hands scrape over the tender skin on Sam’s inner wrist as he strokes his thumb over his son’s pulse and Dean is mesmerized by the movement for the moment, the juxtaposition between Sam’s pale, skinny wrist and his father’s broad, strong hands captivating him.

He’s not really sure what he expects to see more clearly when he takes stiff, stilted steps forward into the whitewashed room, delving deeper into the scent of anti-bacterial and clean linens. 

Sam’s just lying there. He’s pale and unconscious, there’s an IV punched into the meat of his inner elbow on his right arm, his forearms are lashed to the hospital bed because he’s a suicide risk, but he still looks like Sam. He still looks like Dean’s brother.

There’s no gauze padding around his wrists where he might have tried to slash them open. There’s no thick welt around his neck from where he might have secured a noose. There’s no broken bones or bruises from where he might have tried to leap from the roof like he’d tried once when he was nine wearing a beach towel as a Superman cape and shouting, “Dean, look!” as Dean scrambled up the ladder and dragged him back down, screaming himself hoarse about how Sam might have hurt himself if he hadn’t been there to catch him before he fell.

Dean makes it to the waste bin before the black coffee that he drank for breakfast comes ricocheting back up, acidic and vile on his tongue and in the back of his nose as he coughs and gags. He shoves his mother’s hands away when she tries to rub his back comfortingly. The back of his hand slips through the sweat on his upper lip when he wipes his mouth.

“How?” he whispers over his shoulder because he needs to know. 

John looks at him with the dark eyes of a man who found his youngest child unresponsive a handful of hours ago and had a sudden nightmare flashback to Vietnam. “Dean,” he says and his voice holds a warning tone, because he’ll tell Dean if he presses.

Mary tenses where she stands at Dean’s back.

“Tell me.”

John observes him for a few more silent seconds before conceding. “I came home early to check in and I found him in a full bath with half a pack of sleeping pills in him.”

Dean coughs and gags again, but the only thing left is bile that stings all the way up. He tries to imagine for a moment that he was bent under the Chevy’s hood, fiddling with the delicate inner systems of a machine while John was hauling Sam out of a bathtub, cradling a sopping wet boy to his chest and screaming his name, hands frantically hunting out vital signs. Maybe John figured it out, shoved his fingers down Sam’s throat and made him gag it all back up while Dean was sifting through Allen wrenches. Maybe John was ducking into an ambulance when Dean was walking down a hall. Maybe John was saving Sam’s life while Dean was miles away, thinking about nothing important.

He chokes and gags but there’s nothing left inside of him that he can spare anymore.

“He didn’t- he didn’t leave a note?” Dean can hear the own desperation in his voice. He’s so damn lost and confused and he just needs to know why Sam, the reason Dean’s world has fucking gravity, wouldn’t tell him if something were so wrong he thought that this was the only way out. He needs to know what he did wrong.

John exhales and reaches into the pocket of his coat to produce a thick envelope. His knees pop as he stands to pass it over.

The envelope just says ‘Dean’ on the front.

“I didn’t read it,” John grunts as he sits again and goes back to keeping a hand on Sam’s pulse.

Dean thinks maybe he should take the letter away, read it somewhere in private, but he’s already tearing into it with a fevered frenzy that speaks volumes about his panicked need.

He pulls out the wad of paper and rolls them out only to find that instead of staring at Sam’s scrawl he’s looking at a print-out of an article with a timestamp from the public library in the corner. Confused, he shuffles through the next couple of papers frantically, looking for _Sam_ in the envelope and only finding scans of psychology textbooks and highlighted clippings held together with paper clips and rubber bands. The dates on the timestamps go back months.

Finally, in the very back folded in half and then half again is a college ruled sheet of lined notebook paper with Sam’s handwriting all over it. 

He sinks to the floor on his jelly knees and starts at the beginning because he’s not sure what else to do.

‘ _Dean_ ’ the letter reads in small, unassuming letters in blue pen. ‘ _I’m sorry about all the papers; I couldn’t find any good sources. It’s actually a lot harder than I expected to find articles on incest that weren’t about a victim/antagonist dynamic. If I read ‘victim of incest’ one more time, I swear to God. People aren’t victims of incest. People are victims of rape or molestation or whatever. Incest is the result. Shit’s unprofessional_.’

“What?” Dean breathes and squints to make sure he’s read that right. Sam’s in the fucking hospital and his last letter to Dean was going to be about complaining about the standpoint people take when writing articles about incest?

‘ _The best I’ve gotten out of all of this is that about seventy percent of people have moderately incestuous thoughts throughout their childhood. That’s normal. But those thoughts go away when they hit puberty. That’s normal, too._

_‘I swear, Dean. I thought it was going to go away. I never would have done this to any of you if I’d known._ ’

Dean’s blood is white wash and his brain is sponge cake.

‘ _I thought I’d hit fourteen and it’d just go away. You have to believe me I never wanted to go here. I’m just a big fat freak with a hard-on for his brother-’_ the trail of ink goes skating off the page before relocating the line. In the margins surrounding the word ‘F R E A K’ is scribbled over and over in varying sizes and fonts, cursive and block layering over and over until everything’s mostly just a black, buzzing cloud that whispers the word over and over.

‘ _I’m sorry, Dean. God, I’m so, so sorry for everything that this is going to do but I can’t stay. I’m disgusting. You probably hate me now anyway. I don’t even know why I’m writing any of this down’_

There are a few dots next to the word, like maybe Sam had tapped his pen as he thought over throwing the letter away _._ The handwriting gets sloppier when it starts again. Maybe because Sam was crying. Maybe because the sleeping pills were kicking in.

‘ _I need you to know that none of this is your fault. This is on me. All of this is because of me and my problems. You didn’t do anything wrong, I’m just_

_‘Sick_

_‘Or something_

_‘Like I said, research was inconclusive_

_‘I can’t live like this. I won’t do that to myself. I’ll go to Hell before I do it to you._

_‘Please don’t tell mom and dad. Please. I know it’s asking a lot, but I don’t want them to remember me like that.’_ Another half a sentence fills up the end of the line, sloppily scratched out so that the, ‘ _I’m telling you because,_ ’ is still visible under the scribbling, unfinished.

_‘Bye, Dean.’_

The ink skips eight lines before, shoved small in the lowest corner of the page lies, _‘I lo’_

The ‘o’ is aborted and misshapen; a small, incomplete whorl. The word is abandoned at the bottom of the paper.

Dean tries to see inside himself and find out how he feels but he’s empty, just a husk of a man; a mannequin shaped like his former self sitting on the floor in a hospital holding six month’s research on incestuous tendencies in siblings and Sam’s last words.

“Dean?” Mary’s voice filters through his ears and turns into putty in his head. Slender fingers encroach on the peripherals of his vision as Mary reaches for the letter, no doubt assuming that, as Sam’s mother, she has a right to know.

Dean snatches the letter back and scuttles away reproachfully, folding everything back in on itself as he goes.

“Dean, please,” Mary implores.

“No,” Dean breathes. “No, no, it’s okay. It’s okay.” And once he gets his mouth going it doesn’t seem to want to stop. “Everything’s gonna be okay.” He tucks the letter into the waistband of his jeans as he heaves himself upright, only stumbling slightly as he treks over to Sam’s bedside. “It’s all gonna be okay.” He looks down at the scared, skinny boy on the hospital bed. “I’m here. It’s okay.”

His hands flutter uselessly on the edge of everything Sam, because he’s not sure if he’s allowed to touch. He’s not sure what happens next. He’s not sure if he’s going to be allowed to keep Sam. He’s not sure if Sam is going to want to stay. He’s not really sure of anything except that he’ll give Sam everything –every single thing that he has to give- to keep him safe. Even if that means leaving. Even if that means never looking back.

What have I done, Dean thinks as he looks at Sam. God, what have I done?

-

Sam slips out of unconsciousness and into actual sleep around six in the afternoon and John puts his hand under Mary’s elbow and tells her that they need to talk about Sam, tells Dean to hold down the fort and that they’ll be back soon with some food from the cafeteria.

Dean nods but doesn’t look up from watching Sam and wondering what he could have done differently to have avoided this. He thinks about the fireworks on the fourth of July. He thinks about Sam making him grilled cheese sandwiches. He thinks about holding a baby in his arms on the front lawn of a burning building. He would trade every single second of those memories to not be sitting next to Sam in the hospital right now.

He scrubs a hand against his forehead and leans back into the unforgiving plastic of the hospital chair. A sigh rattles out of his chest like a dying breath and he’s so, so tired.

Dean has watched Sam sleep for a decent portion of his life; across the tent in camping trips in the hazy light of a dying fire just beyond the boundaries of privacy, across the couch in the flickering light of the television after he kept him up too late watching _Cool Hand Luke_ , across a mattress in the brief flashes of lightning as he snuffled with the remnants of a nightmare, across the backseat of the Impala in the ebb and flow of streetlamp glow. He’s never watched Sam sleep like this, though; across a sterile white room in the dying sunlight slating in through the blinds in the window.

He still sounds the same when he starts to wake up, though.

Sam makes a throaty noise that rumbles out through the small parting of his lips as he rustles and stirs.

Dean’s up on his feet so fast he gets a little light headed and looms over Sam, making himself the first thing Sam’s sees when he opens his eyes blearily.

“Dean?” Sam rasps and reaches to rub at his eyes. His wrists snag on the restraints and the nylon wheezes under the pressure. Sam goes from zero to panic in three point five.

“Hey, hey, hey, wait,” Dean cuts in quickly as Sam starts to writhe and heave. “Sam, Sam, look at me, calm down.”

“What’s going on?” Sam snaps, eyes wide and rolling as he pants frantically.

“What’s the last thing that you remember?” Dean asks, surprised by how solid his own voice is.

Sam slows steadily as he screws up his face in deep thought, nose wrinkling in a fashion that might have been endearing fourteen hours ago but right now just makes Dean sad.

He knows the exact moment Sam realizes what he’s done because his face leaks out all emotion into the only defense he has against Dean: complete and total blankness. “Oh,” he says and rolls his hands weakly in the bindings, still struggling for freedom no matter how futile his bids are.

“Oh?” Dean repeats, a small huff of slightly hysterical laughter edging into the word. “Oh? _Oh?_ You scare the absolute shit outta me and all you have to say is ‘oh’?” Irritation starts to buzz under his skin and he wants to smother it and come into this conversation cool as a cucumber but Sam’s not making an ‘I’m sorry’ face or a ‘Fuck off’ face or even an ‘I’m tired can we talk about this later’ face. There’s just nothing there for Dean to latch on to and it’s going to drive him crazy before the smell of the hospital does and he’s been here for nearly eight hours already.

“Sorry,” Sam says, voice dull.

Dean wants to throw something, scream, cry, scare Sam so bad that he has to talk. Instead, he takes a deep breath and eases himself down to his knees, kneeling at an altar of hospital bed to Sam. “Sam. Please. Talk to me.”

Sam’s laugh is bitter and cold. “What do you want me to say, Dean?”

Dean doesn’t know. He doesn’t know anything anymore. “I got… I got your letter.”

Sam flinches and turns away as much as he can without welting his wrists.

“Sam, c’mon, look at me,” he coaxes gently and, in a fit of spontaneous courage spawned from absolute desperation, reaches up to angle Sam’s face towards him. “This doesn’t have to change anything.”

A subtle sort of malicious awe creeps into Sam’s face, like he can’t believe Dean is real and not in a good way. “This changes everything.” His eyes get steadily glossier as he looks his brother over and Dean responds in like, crying for the first time all afternoon.

“God, Sam,” he wheezes like the words were punched right out of him and scrubs at his burning eyes. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”

Sam’s throat clicks wetly when he swallows. “What?”

“This is my fault,” he babbles. “God this is all my fault. Last night and everything before that. This is all my fault, I’m so sorry.”

“Get out,” Sam grits through clenched teeth.

Dean’s so startled that all he can do is exhale out, “What?”

Sam writhes violently and the nylon twined around his forearms stretches audibly when he lunges against it, the noise of skin twisting and breaking underneath it meshing with Sam as he screams, “Get out!”

Dean stumbles back on his knees, falling flat on his back in shock. Sam keeps screaming and hissing and writhing and suddenly people are there, sneakered feet and cotton-candy colored scrubs on Dean’s level. Strong voices shouts orders for sedatives and strong hands are pushing Dean out, telling him he has to leave, has to get out because he’s not qualified to take care of Sam. Not anymore. 

The door closes and Dean’s on the outside.

-

“Next day was a mess. Lots of people trying to ask me how I was feeling.” Dean rolls his eyes and takes a bite out of the pizza Nolan was nice enough to order for them and shrugs like it isn’t hard to swallow. He doesn’t mention when he finally got around to going home he bypassed his own bedroom and went straight for the bathroom, locking the door and crawling into the dry tub he and Sam had sat in four years beforehand with a baby tooth held between them. “Sam wouldn’t talk to anyone at the hospital so my dad did some digging and found you, you and Sammy hit it off, and the rest-” he slurps the last of the soda up through the straw with a gurgling sound, “is history.”

“True,” Dr. Okoro picks at her salad, “but it does not end there.”

Dean clenches his jaw.

-

He’s not sure who told. Deirdre Mchough’s mother is a nurse at the hospital, AJ Caldwell was in getting his arm put in a cast, Annie Kelley was visiting her grandmother, Mrs. Rutherford volunteers on Friday afternoons. Any of them could have heard anything, Dean supposes. Any one of them could have blabbed.

All he knows is that when he comes back to school Monday after next everyone stares at him. Some frown sympathetically, some snicker.

Dean would prefer it if they all snickered.

He keeps his chin up when people whisper, but with a week without him there to tamper rumors Sammy Suicide has taken on a life of its own. The golden boy without any real friends suddenly has a very tangible flaw and the vultures are swarming.

Dean gets into so many fights on his first day back they sideline him for another week and he comes back the same day Sam does, both of them with new schedules and different rides to school.

Sam keeps his head up, ignores people when they try to talk to him or ask him why or ask him how. The teachers are nervous around him, tip-toeing like anything they say might set him off, any responsibility they give him is going to be the straw that breaks the camel’s back and they’ll be responsible for Sam Winchester punching his own card successfully this time around.

No one knows that it’s actually Dean’s fault. No one knows that Dean fucked him up.

No one is ever going to know.

Dean’s not there to play witness to it, but he hears from Patrick O’Bryan later that Sam flips his shit on Coach Kint when he refuses to let Sam swim.

“It was beautiful, man,” Patrick smiles nostalgically. “He told Coach to stop pussy-footing around and either put him in or kick him out because he didn’t fucking walk around in speedos just for kicks.”

Dean snorts and digs back into the engine of the Chevy. He tries not to wish that Sam would have told him this story himself, but they haven’t been in the same room together for extended periods, let alone had a multi-syllabic conversation, in two weeks. “What happened next?”

Patrick laughs and leans against the passenger side door heavily so he can cross his feet at the ankle. “Kint jumped on the chance. Called him out on being disrespectful and told him to get lost.”

Dean winces. “Sam didn’t tell me.”

“Yeah, well.” Patrick shrugs. “ _My_ little brother doesn’t tell me everything.”

Neither does Dean’s.

He hears Sam crying again through the wall that night and he presses himself against the drywall and hopes that Sam can feel him through it.

-

It’s a well-known fact throughout the school that the vice principal, Mr. Hank Gambol, splits his time between walking the school hallways and praying for the mortal souls of his students. He keeps his hair cropped short, his shirts pressed, and his glasses clean so as to better see sin and corruption among the staff and students of his school. Or so he says.

Dean and Mr. Gambol have never been on good terms. Dean fights and cusses and fucks too much and Mr. Gambol does approximately none of those things. There’s no basis for any relationship other than mutual disdain for the other’s existence.

Which is why, when he catches Dean roaming the hallways in a general ‘towards Sam’ direction in the middle of class just to check on him, Mr. Gambol just rolls his eyes and clucks his tongue.

“Dean, Dean, Dean,” he sighs like he’s so very put upon by Dean’s disobedience. “I really thought we’d be past all this by now.”

Dean snorts through his nose and rolls his shoulders irritably. “Can we not? I’ve been having a bad day, Gambol.”

“And with your brother,” Gambol lets out a low whistle. “You should really start trying to be a better role model after what happened.”

Dean’s blood turns into ice water in his veins. “Excuse you?”

“The Lord, Dean,” he says like it should explain everything. “He made us in his image, and he doesn’t appreciate it when that image is defiled, even by our own hands.”

Dean is actually so affronted he can’t move, petrified to the spot with some stupid look on his face as he tries to wrap his head around the fucking _audacity._

Mr. Gambol straightens his posture to a more refined reflection of himself and clears his throat. “I’m just thinking of your brother’s eternal soul, Dean. Now is the time to help him find the Lord, God, to save him from the eternal punishment awaiting him in Hell.”

“Shut up.” Dean trembles.

“He’s going to Hell, Dean,” Mr. Gambol plows forward. “God doesn’t forget.”

“Shut up!” His voice echoes in the hall, resounding.

“I’m just trying to help, Dean.” Gambol holds his hands up, palms open. “Suicide is a very serious matter and we should all be trying to help Sam through these hard times by setting by example and guiding him towards the Lord.”

“I’m not guiding Sam towards shit, Koresh,” Dean growls.

“Then it’s your fault.” Gambol shrugs. “You’re the one keeping him out of eternal paradise.”

“I…” Dean’s mouth goes dry because, oh God, what if it’s true? He’s never been religious. Dean got the dirty blond hair and the freckles from their mother and Sam got the dark hair and stubbornness from their father, but Dean got lack of belief in any higher power in his life other than himself from John where Sam got God from Mary.

But what if Dean’s wrong? What if there is a God and angels and Heaven and Hell and damnation and demons? What if he’s wrong and he’s barred Sam from heaven by corrupting him? By fucking him up?

Then there’s a fist in Gambol’s face and Dean’s confused because his arm is still by his side.

“Shut up!” Sam screams as Gambol stumbles backwards, clutching his bleeding nose. He’s vibrating with fury; it’s rolling off of him in waves; chest heaving, eyes rolling, hands shaking. There’s blood on his knuckles and Dean’s too stunned to think about anything other than how far they’ve fallen.

The hallway is lined with students and teachers peering out of their classroom doors, drawn there from either Dean or Sam shouting. They’re all staring at Sam. Dean’s staring at Sam. Sam with his hair caught in the harsh fluorescent lights that glance off his cheekbones and flash in his eyes. Sam with his chest heaving against his shirt. Sam with his bloody, bloody knuckles.

“What?” Sam whips around and snaps down the hall, stance just asking for somebody to come and take him up on his offer for a good whooping.

“Sam.” Dean’s voice is a rough rasp as he reaches for Sam because he wants to comfort and soothe and make sure his hand isn’t broken.

Sam flinches away violently, shooting Dean a wide-eyed look as he stumbles backwards. The lockers clatter and clang when his back hits them and Dean winces. “Don’t touch me!” Sam shouts. “Leave me alone! Everyone just leave me alone!”

Dean just stands dumbfounded when Sam snarls a wordless sound and takes off towards the exit and wonders when the hell Sam got so damn angry at the world.

Sam gets off with a warning because he’s been under emotional distress and hearing an authority figure tell your brother that you’re going to hell can be a little triggering, the school board supposes. But he’s done something unacceptable in the eyes of the students, tipped the scales away from sad, suicidal boy who needs sympathy to a violent psychopath with a hair trigger. He’s dangerous now.

-

Dean starts having nightmares about Sam burning again.

-

“Hey!” Dean shouts as he wrenches Jack Fletcher’s arm behind his back. “Get the hell off of him!”

“Ow! Shit!” Jack howls and struggles against Dean’s grip. “Lemme go, asshole!” He claws backwards blindly and Dean knees him in the small of his back, right where his spine slopes into his pelvis.

“I said,” Dean growls and fists one hand in Jack’s black hair, “ _get off him._ ”

Jack lets go of the front of Sam’s shirt and Sam slumps to the ground, not bothering to stop his head from clanging against the lockers and then bump-bump-bumping along the vents. Blood gushes from his nose, painting his lips and smearing all the way down his neck to stain the collar of his shirt. His teeth are orange with it as blood floods the small, awed part in his lips. There’s a cut underneath his right eye, which is wide in what could be wonderment. His left eye is nearly swollen shut. His pupils are blown wide with shock.

Dean lays a good whallop on Jack, hears his nose crunch wetly and turns him loose, a swift kick to the ass getting him scrambling down the hall before Dean changes his mind about not crippling him permanently.

“I’ll fucking take care of you later, Fletcher!” he shouts down the hall, knuckles throbbing.

Dean’s on his knees next to Sam before Jack’s even out of sight. “Jesus, Sam,” he breathes, grabbing his younger brother’s jaw. Sam flinches but lets him angle the cut on his cheek towards the light so he can see it better.

“I had it handled,” Sam slurs around his fat lip.

“You call letting Fletcher beat your face in having it handled?” Dean demands, fingertips digging in slightly to Sam’s face as his temper begins to slip. “You weren’t even fighting back, Sam!”

“I had it coming,” he mumbles before he seems to come to his senses a bit, blinking hard and then glaring at Dean like he’s just realized who he is. “Get off me, man.” He shoves Dean’s hands away sloppily. “Would you just leave me alone?”

“Sam, c’mon,” Dean reaches forward again, catching Sam’s wrists. “Just because you… look, just because you think you—or whatever, doesn’t mean I feel any different about you, okay? We’re still brothers. I just want to help you.”

“You want to help me?” he asks, voice full of snake venom. “Get lost.”

He wrings his wrists out of Dean’s grip and storms off.

Dean lets him leave.

Dean lets him leave and doesn’t even realize that he did until he’s driving home, and then it’s the only thing he can think about.

He’s let Sam leave him one time before, and look how fucking splendidly that one turned out.

He _let_ Sam leave. He didn’t follow. He didn’t flag him down and force him to ride home with him. He didn’t even try to call him back.

“Jesus.” He smothers a hand down his face as he pulls into the smooth concrete slate of their driveway. He turns the key and with a few settling pops and whirrs the engine idles and dies. He sits alone, warm leather and comforting smells all around him. “I don’t know what to do anymore,” he admits to his car, rubbing down the dashboard.

The Impala hums and makes a few more settling noises before going silent.

He sighs heavily and plants his forehead on the rise of the steering wheel.

“How did this even happen?” he asks, because he has so many questions all the time anymore. Are things ever going to go back, are they ever going to be okay, when did Sam start— when did Sam—how did he figure out that he wanted—

Dean swallows and sits upright, stares straight ahead and says, halting and strained: “Sam wants to fuck me.”

There it is, then.

He tastes his tongue, but the flavor is still the same, not tainted by the words, so he says it again.

“Sam wants to fuck me.”

No giant fist falls from the sky to strike him dead.

He clears his throat, shifts in his seat, and then says, loudly and clearly “Sam wants to fuck me, and that is wrong.”

Because it is wrong. They’re siblings; they grew up in each other’s pockets. You’re not supposed to want to get naked with the person who used to help change your diapers and wiped your nose and held you when you were afraid of the alligators in the reptile house at the zoo when you were nine. It’s not right. It’s not natural.

“Sam wants to fuck me, which is wrong, and he needs help.”

Discomfort snakes up his spine like a hissing, writhing python and Dean shudders with it.

“Stupid,” he mutters as he realizes he’s just been talking to himself about how Sam wants a one-way ticket on the Dean Winchester express for a good five minutes. “So, so stupid.” He gets out of the car, door squeaking on its hinges and suspension shifting as he relieves the car of his weight.

How is he supposed to help Sam if he can’t even get close to him anymore?

He sighs again and ambles towards the mailbox, one hand shoved deep in the pocket of his leather jacket.

Get lost, Sam said to him.

Get lost.

Dean huffs a breath as he wrenches open the mailbox and retrieves the contents, flipping it closed with a snap.

If he could ‘get lost’, he would. Maybe Sam just needs some time and distance to get over this—whatever this is. Maybe that would be the way Dean could help; just by leaving Sam the hell alone.

He snorts as he flips through the wad of envelopes in his hand.

He’s graduating in two months and it’s always been a silent agreement among he and his parents that he’d work in John’s garage after he was through with high school- maybe take a few courses at the community college until he could decide what he really wanted to do with himself and had the money to back it up. He hasn’t applied for any of the schools that have sent him letter after letter, never even thought to think about it.

His keys jangle as he fits them in the lock, pressing the door open before tossing them off to the side table in the foyer, freeing both hands to leaf through the remaining envelopes.

Most are addressed to Mr. John Winchester, with logos for insurance and electric companies stamped high on the corner, a couple for Mrs. Mary Winchester, a few college brochures targeted at ‘Are you Dean Winchester?’ and one leaflet in the very back that catches Dean’s total attention.

The other envelopes flutter to the ground; white butterflies settling on the wood flooring of the front hall as the one leaflet stays with Dean.

A dozen hard, stoic faces stare up at him with firm eyes and set jaws. Their blue collars reach high up their necks and the black bills of their white caps reach low on their brow, shadowing their faces. They’re embroidered with gold, embellished with pins and patches and bobbles set in clean, straight lines regally. They all look like heroes.

_‘The Few, The Proud, The Marines,’_ the top font reads, and then below it: ‘ _Dean Winchester, are you ready to join?_ ’

Ready to pack up and sign his soul over to the government of the United States of America? Ready to shave his head and stand tall as a man barks orders in his face, shouts him down, tells him that he’s a worthless piece of shit until proven otherwise? Ready to get shipped off somewhere where it’s hot and humid and there are bugs he’s never even seen in his worst nightmares? Ready to get so far away from Sam that he won’t even think about his soldier brother for maybe days at a time?

Yes, please.

His knees are watery as he stumbles his way over to the hall mirror and stares, tries to see himself like the men on the pamphlet: stoic, proud heroes.

Men who save people. Men like John.

Blood is rising high in his face and he’s panting with the weight of this moment, standing on the precipice of a decision that’s going to change his entire life and he’s already got one foot over the edge.

He tries to imagine what the splutter of machine gun fire sounds like when it’s right in your ear.

The door creaks when it opens and Dean whips around just in time to see Sam shuffle in, head down with blood dry and crusty down his neck. He seems startled when he looks up to see Dean. He stops mid step and looks confused.

“Dean?” His brow crunches up in the center. “Are… you okay?”

“I-” Dean swallows hard, clutches at the half-sheet of photo-grade paper in his hand and watches Sam’s eyes as they slowly track down and notice what Dean’s holding.

Sam goes pale underneath the layer of blood. “Oh God,” he says like it was punched out of him. “Oh my God.” He stumbles back towards the door.

“No, Sam, wait,” Dean pleads quickly, “think about it, man; it wouldn’t even be that bad.”

“No.” Sam brings his hands to his face, shaking his head furiously. “No, no, no. I’ll do better, I promise, I’ll try harder, I’ll be better! Just don’t- please, no, you can’t-”

“Sam!” Dean reaches for Sam, because he never learns.

“No!” Sam stumbles back into the door. “I’m gonna fix this!”

Dean wishes he knew what the hell that even means, but he doesn’t have time to ask before Sam wrenching open the door and sprinting off.

Dean lets him leave. Dean lets him leave and doesn’t even realize it until Sam slinks back in after dark. The cut on his cheek has a butterfly bandage tacking it together and is shiny with Neosporin, the swelling around his eye has gone down like there’s been an ice pack pressed to it. His hair is wet, all the blood on his face and chest scrubbed clean like he’d taken a shower. The shirt he’s wearing isn’t his.

Dean doesn’t ask who Sam went to for comfort, but he hates them. He doesn’t know who Sam allowed to help him- stitch him back together and breathe some life into him like a velveteen rabbit- but whoever they are, he hates them.   
  



	4. Part 4

  


  
  
“It was Charlie, was it not?” Dr. Okoro inquires after Dean breaks off.

Dean unclenches his fists from the tops of his knees. “Yeah. Chuck Patton.”

“You do not like him?” she muses.

“Not that I don’t like him,” Dean shrugs. “I just,” _wish he were dead_ , “don’t appreciate him as much as Sam does.” His tone holds a note of finality that says he won’t speak more on the subject of Charlie Douchebag Patton.

“Hm.” Dr. Okoro nods, scribbles something down on her pad. “May I ask you a question?”

“Shoot.” Dean leans back into the sofa and kicks his feet up again, shifting until he’s comfortable.

“How many relationships have you been in?”

Dean glances over at her, eyes sharp. “Define ‘relationship.’”

“Alright.” She thinks on it a moment, propping her chin again in her palm and her elbow on her knee, foot bobbing. “Longer than three months.”

Dean scoffs. “Never. Closest would be Cassie Robinson, I guess. We dated for a month, maybe.”

Dr. Okoro nods. “What attracted you to Cassie?”

“The sex was good.” Dean shrugs. “I don’t know, she was fun and she could drive. She was into journalism and stuff. She was cool.”

“Why do you think it did not work out?”

“Eh,” Dean shrugs again, shifts to burrow deeper into the creamy leather of the sofa. “She said we didn’t have a connection outside of sex. Apparently we didn’t talk enough. Lack of communication, she said. That and we didn’t go on dates really unless there was a big, naked promise for the night. But, whatever, it wasn’t like I was ashamed to be seen with her in public or anything. Just…”

“Just?” Dr. Okoro prompts.

“I dunno.” He shifts more perceptibly this time, discomfort coiling tight in his muscles so that no position is relaxed. “I’ll go out with friends, have a good time, but…” He pauses, frustrated, and tries to choose his words. “I just- if I want to hang out with someone I have Sam. I don’t have to go out and find people to go get food with me ‘cause I can walk down the damn hall and tell Sam to put his shoes on. I don’t need to ask friends from work or some chick to go see a movie with me, or hang out at a bar, or whatever.”

Dr.Okoro’s bangles clang and jangle as she writes something else down and Dean feels like he gave the wrong answer for some reason.

“So, you’re saying that your relationship failed because you prefer spending time with your brother than with someone else?”

“What? No.” Dean protests. “Just, I don’t see why I should go out of my way to make friends when I’ve already got one.”

“Alright, alright,” she concedes, noting Dean’s defensive tone. “What about Sam, do you think? Does he need other people to go out with?”

Dean grinds his teeth.

-

Summer comes and goes, Sam gets some color back in his cheeks and slowly, very slowly, things resettle. John doesn’t take the locks off the medicine cabinets or reinstall the plugs in the bathtubs after he ripped them out, but everyone regains a routine.

Dean and John both work at the garage from seven in the morning until around four in the afternoon. Mary assists at the daycare when she’s not busy teaching preschoolers their colors. Sam goes to school from six until four, goes to therapy twice a week, and generally spends most of his time avoiding people from school by studying up and researching colleges across the country.

There are facts of life that Dean lives with from day to day: seven o’ clock is too damn early to be awake and functioning at a higher level, little old ladies will inevitably hit on the mechanic replacing their brakes shamelessly, and Sam wants to fuck him.

It wasn’t perfect, but it worked for them.

And then Sam had to go and fuck it up.

Dean knows when he walks in the back door and toes off his muddy boots that something’s different, something’s off, because Sam’s got both of their parents sat down on the couch and there’s a boy with a mess of copper bronze hair and bright, toffee colored eyes. He smiles hesitantly when Dean comes up short in the doorway and Dean feels a brush of recognition in the back of his mind, like he should know who the hell this kid standing next to his brother is.

“What’s going on?” Dean asks.

“Sam has something to tell us,” Mary explains slowly, hands wringing together in her lap.

Sam fidgets nervously, eyes darting around like he’s about to bolt. The kid reaches out and puts a hand on the back of his neck and Sam settles.

Dean’s eyebrows make a break for his hairline.

“Mom, Dad,” Sam says, doesn’t look at Dean, “This is Charlie, my…” he pauses, sets his chin, and then dives right for it, “My boyfriend.”

“Oh.” Mary says after a few moments of silence.

If that wasn’t the reaction Sam was expecting, he doesn’t look surprised.

Dean feels like the rug’s been pulled out from under his feet and he’s all pin-wheeling arms and staggering back steps trying to regain his upright and correct position in the universe.

Maybe he shouldn’t feel as blindsided as he does because, technically, he already knew this little nugget of information about his brother. Sam can look at a boy and think ‘I want that.’ Yes. Cool. Awesome. That doesn’t mean he gets to go out and get a fucking boyfriend. Sam doesn’t know this kid. More importantly, this kid doesn’t know _Sam._ The gall of this boy, thinking that he has any right to keep his hand on the back of Sam’s neck, to stand there in the middle of their family room and give cool, unwavering support like it’s his job or something.

Dean looks to John desperately, because if anyone is going to put a stop to this absolute fucking ridiculousness, it’s going to be him.

However, John just stands, as tall and intimidating as he’s been all his life and Charlie swallows and backs up a bit towards Sam when John steps forward towards him. He barely conceals a flinch when John extends a hand.

It takes a few seconds of Charlie staring at the hand like it’s going to bite him and John staring at Charlie like he’s mentally deficient before Charlie seems to realize that he’s supposed to shake the hand offered.

“Oh,” he says, high and breathy, and scrambles to shake John’s hand enthusiastically.

“Nice to meet you, son.” John’s voice is a low rumble, dark like thunder clouds. Charlie winces when John grips his hand tight, a squeeze that’s a sharp warning and a dark threat all in one. John lets go first and Charlie cradles his own hand gently against his chest.

“Yes, sir, you too,” Charlie stammers and Dean wants to punch him because no one who lets John scent his fear is good enough for Sam. The fact that they’ve never met anyone that wasn’t at least a little afraid of John Winchester notwithstanding. 

Sam shoots his father a pointed look and John steps back towards the couch. Mary, apparently realizing that she’s been staring and not speaking for a few solid minutes, hops up with a smile that’s a little too bright not to be a little manic and takes Charlie’s hand as well before smothering him in a hug.

“Great to meet you,” she says warmly.

“I’ve heard a lot about you, Mrs. Winchester,” Charlie smiles, all polite southern boy manners.

“Call me Mary, dear.” She pulls back and smiles at him, a little less crazed in the eyes this time around.

He smiles sheepishly back at her.

Dean’s still staring at Sam when everyone seems to simultaneously realize that he hasn’t said a word about any of this yet. Suddenly all eyes are on Dean.

“Uh,” Dean stutters. “Uh. Hey, Charlie. I’ve seen you around the high school, right? You’re a grade above Sam.”

“Yeah, I’m a Junior.” Charlie nods. “I was on swim team with Sam.”

Dean squints hard at him and realizes that if you slapped a white cap on him and stripped him down to a red speedo, Dean recognizes him from swim meets. He remembers him helping pull Sam out of the water and shouting congratulations. He frowns when he realizes that he knows what this boy’s torso looks like when it’s wet with pool water and pressed against Sam’s in a victory embrace.

“Dean,” Sam intones.

“Right, right, yeah,” Dean clears his throat. “Great to meet ya’, Chuck.” He doesn’t make a move to extend his hand and Charlie shifts on his feet. 

“Are you staying for dinner, Charlie?” Mary asks and Dean shoots her a reproving glare.

“Nah, my mom’s expecting me home soon,” Charlie responds bashfully and scuffs his shoe against the floor. “I just wanted to be here when Sam told you for moral support and stuff, I guess.” He glances over at Sam and shoots him a soft, sweet smile.

Dean wants to gag.

Sam’s smile is a little forced when he glances at Dean, but the hardness fades out when he turns to usher Charlie towards the front hall.

Dean cuts out the back door before either Mary or John can say anything and circles around the house, socks squishing into the mud and wet moss on the side yard, and gets to the front just in time to see Charlie press his lips to Sam’s forehead and tell him “You did so good in there, Sam. I’m so proud of you.”

Sam beams and Charlie swats him back into the house affectionately.

It’s obvious from the strangled gasp that clambers out of Charlie’s throat when he turns around that he wasn’t expecting to see Dean leaning against the passenger’s side door of his car.

“Jesus Christ!” He slaps a hand over his chest. “You scared the hell outta me!”

“Listen, Chuck,” Dean snips because he just straight does not give a single fuck if Charlie is actually having some intense coronary distress or not. “I’d like to think I’m a calm, rational sort of person, but I’m gonna be a little forward with you right now. You hurt my brother? I’ll kill you.”

Charlie goes to laugh the comment off nervously before he catches the cold, hard steel of Dean’s eyes and then he’s swallowing hard. “Uh, yeah, yeah, of course, man. I’d never- no way. I like Sam.” He stammers out quickly. “I like Sam a lot.”

Dean narrows his eyes at him.

“I don’t know what you’re so worried about,” Charlie shoots him a smile that probably has most people going soft in the knees. “I’d never actually intentionally hurt Sam. I know he’s had it kind of rough over the past year or so,” Dean’s knuckles tense, “but I’m not trying to take advantage of him, honest!” he says earnestly before glancing at the ground with a small, wistful smile. “Actually, I’ve had a big ol’ crush on him for a while now.”

If he thinks he’s endearing himself to Dean, he’s sorely mistaken.

Dean steps away, lets Charlie get to his car. He doesn’t wave back when Charlie raises his hand on the way down the street, but he does glare after him for the longest time before turning and walking back up to the front door. Muddy sock prints follow him all the way up.

Sam’s loitering by the door when he steps in and bends over to peel off his dirty socks.

“What?” Dean grouses, catching the edge of Sam staring at him with an odd look on his face in the peripherals of his vision.

“Nothing,” Sam drawls slowly. “I just… Nothing.”

John steps out into the front hall and he and Dean watch Sam hoof it up the stairs.

John snorts softly under his breath. “I give it a week.”

He’s off by about two years.

-

Maybe it irritates Dean more than it should; gets under his skin and festers, itching constantly in the back of his mind.

Sam has a boyfriend.

Sam’s boyfriend is a fucking pussy, but even omitting that fact, Sam has a boyfriend.

Sam has a boyfriend and Dean doesn’t know what that means. Is Sam … ‘better’? Is Sam ‘cured’? Does he look at Dean and not think ‘Damn, I wanna get with that’ anymore? Is he—normal?

The thought clings to the back of Dean’s tongue, makes his mouth taste funny in a way that’s got him licking his lips and smacking his tongue against the roof of his mouth in continual irritation.

If Sam’s not pining for a slice of Dean-pie, why haven’t things gone back to the way they were before, then? Why doesn’t Sam come to him when he has problems or when he needs help? Why don’t they talk anymore? Why can’t Dean sit on the couch and flip on _The Magnificent Seven_ with one arm thrown up over the back edge of the sofa and expect Sam to fill in that space and curl into his side anymore?

If Sam’s really over this _thing,_ why aren’t they themselves yet?

Dean doesn’t so much as ‘brood’ on these questions while doing yard work as much as he ‘rakes aggressively while pondering his relationship with his brother.’

“You got a grudge against my rake?” John rumbles throatily from beside him, voice colored with amusement. 

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Dean huffs and tightens his hands around the rough, uneven wood of the old rake. His fingers are bare and stiff as the autumn wind bites at his knuckles, so he can’t feel the blisters that he’s working into his palms when he digs back into the task of clearing every damn leaf out of the backyard.

Sam’s not Dean-sexual. Dean knows this, Dean understands this rationally.

He doesn’t know why this is bugging his so much.

Sam has a boyfriend.

Sam has a boyfriend that doesn’t even _look_ like Dean, and what the shit is that all about? If Sam has it so bad for him that he’s willing to jump the gun on the whole living thing just to get away from it, shouldn’t he be pining for people that look like his brother?

What if Sam was just gay this entire time? What if he was just seeing Dean as a dude and thinking ‘hot damn’ instead of as his brother?

Dean’s a hot piece of ass, he’s aware. Sam used to run himself ragged worrying about his appearance, fretting over every detail of his body and complaining about being too chubby one day to too gangly the next, but Dean’s never had that problem. He’s got a jawline carved out of fucking granite, okay. His _eyelids_ are attractive. From the bow in his legs to the freckles on his shoulders, Dean Winchester is inferno-hot. Never once in his damn life has he been insecure about his looks because, even if he couldn’t see it himself, people are pretty much lining up down the block to constantly remind him that he is one fine male specimen. He’s got his momma’s eyes and his daddy’s jawline and it’s a good combination. People want him. People want to be him. It’s not so much as a flattery anymore as it is a fact of his damn life.

He’s a good-looking motherfucker.

So what if Sam was just latching onto that- the attractive male-ness of him, rather than the attractive male brother-ness of him? What if he just wants Dean’s _body_ and not _Dean_?

What if Sam almost killed himself for absolutely nothing?

“Fuck!” Dean shouts as the skin on his palm breaks and throws the rake violently down into the mulch.

“Hey, hey,” John’s beside him again, prying his hands out of the cave he’s burrowing into his stomach with them. “Let me see.”

Dean makes a hissing disgruntled sound through clenched teeth and uncurls his hand so his father can inspect the torn blisters and ruptured skin. Blood and salty serum pool in the cup of his palm, spilling out from between his fingers and dripping down from his knuckles.

John makes a sympathetic noise. “Yeah, alright. You go inside and I’ll wrap up out here. Have Sam dump some peroxide on it for you and wrap it up.”

And with that Dean is dismissed from duty to go back in the house.

The warmth of the foyer stings his wind-burnt cheeks and the tips of his ears the second he walks in and stomps the flecks of moss and dead leaves off his boots and makes towards the medicine cabinet, intent to make due by himself.

Sam’s sitting on the couch, calculus homework balanced on one knee and he’s doing that thing where he balances his pen in the dip between his thumb and forefinger before twirling it in some choreography that Dean thinks is too complicated to follow but Sam obviously finds mindless, because he’s not paying attention to his pen or his homework; he’s watching _The Empire Strikes Back_ raptly.

Dean comes to a stop in the middle of the kitchen, blood drip-drip-dripping onto the clean tiles, and watches over Sam’s shoulder. Han and Leia walk together through the Hoth base, strides wide and aggressive as they spat, denying and accusing affections.

Dean remembers the first time he and Sam watched the movie together, sprawled on the couch with Dean’s feet in Sam’s lap and a big bowl of popcorn wedged between his knees. This is the part where Dean’s supposed to chime in with a joke: “Han’s gonna have to keep going Hand Solo if he can’t get it together”, so damn reliable with the same old line he first made when he was twelve and had to explain it to his eight-year-old brother that he’s practically a part of the movie watching experience anymore.

The moment comes and Dean can feel the words bubbling in his throat, feels like he’s missing a cue in life by not telling the same old joke.

Sam waits the moment of the movie out, laughs lightly under his breath even though nothing funny happened on screen.

Dean swallows and shifts on his feet, red bands striping up his arm to his elbow before dripping down, plopping with distinctive little _splat_ s. Maybe Sam hears in the pitter-patter of little blood drops or maybe after fifteen years he’s got some sort of Dean-sense that tingles when his older brother is about, but Sam turns then, sees Dean looming on the edge of his earth.

“What happened?” Sam’s up off the couch like a shot, homework scattering across the floor as he rushes to cradle Dean’s hands in his own. “Christ, c’mon.” He tugs Dean over to the sink, hits the handle with his elbow and drags their hands under the water.

Dean watches Sam’s face as Sam frowns and cleans the gash in his palm, scrubbing it over firmly and effectively with his own thumbs. Sam’s eyes flick over the work he’s doing, brow creased in the center, teeth sunk deep into his lower lips as he concentrates. He’s so close that Dean can smell him, knows that he’s been stealing Dean’s aftershave because he’s still so new to the shaving game and doesn’t have his own. Dean doesn’t mean to feel smug that there’s a distinct Dean-barrier between Sam and the ever encroaching smell of Charlie on everything that Sam owns.

Sam’s hands are steady in their ministrations, the pads of his thumbs digging into the thick coagulant, scrubbing until there’s just tender, torn flesh and Dean hisses.

“Sorry,” Sam mutters more on reflex than actual sincerity as he shuts the water off and drags Dean over to the cabinet, scrounges up the fat Band-Aids that nobody ever uses because there are a billion of the normal sized ones that can do the job just fine if you layer them, and fishes out some iodine. “Back to the sink,” Sam instructs and Dean realizes for the first time how stupid it is that Sam dragged him over to the cabinet with him in the first place, but Sam’s hand is still firm and solid around Dean’s, his fingers streaked with Dean’s blood now too.

There’s something oddly intimate about that, Dean thinks. Having somebody else’s blood on your hands.

He lets Sam walk him back to the sink, content to take a back seat on this one so he can watch Sam bare his teeth in sympathy when he douses Dean’s palm with the foul-smelling iodine. “Yeah, I know,” he clucks when Dean grunts as the antiseptic flushes him out.

The iodine splatters loudly against the clean porcelain and it stains both of their hands a bright, sickly yellow that Sam pats away with a washcloth. Dean’s still glad that Sam skipped the hydrogen peroxide in favor of the iodine because at least iodine doesn’t fizz and crackle.

“Table,” Sam commands, tugging Dean by the hand to sit in one of the four stiff wooden chairs set up around the casual kitchen table before he takes the seat across from him, the legs of the chair squealing and clattering against the tiles as he yanks the seat back from under the table and swivels it on one leg to open the chair up to access Dean. Their knees bracket each other when Sam sits.

“Crap, forgot the Neosporin. One sec,” Sam excuses himself quickly, putting Dean’s dishtowel-wrapped hand down gingerly on the paisley tablecloth before jogging back to the cabinet and rooting through the only first aid kit they keep unlocked in the house. Dean watches the flex and roll of Sam’s shoulders as he relocates rolls of Ace bandages and gauze and feels the dull throb of his heart beat in his hand. Sam stows everything away again and flicks the cabinet shut casually and the crucifix tacked to the wall above the oven so that little, pinned up Jesus can oversee Mary’s kitchen jumps slightly with the reverberations.

Sam returns, triumphant, their knees knock together when he sits down and for a moment Sam’s hand stutters in unscrewing the cap of the antibiotic cream. He tumbles and recovers quickly, clearing his throat and glancing up at Dean from under his bangs to see if he caught the moment.

Dean feigns innocence.

Instead of squeezing the clear-ish paste into Dean’s palm Sam gathers some up on the pads of his fingers and pats it down onto the rip in Dean’s skin. His face screws up in concentration and Dean starts to wonder again what Sam was thinking when their knees hit together.

The adhesive on the thin paper encasing the Band-Aid makes an acute tearing sound when Sam rips it open with Neosporin-tacky fingers. He smooths it over Dean’s hand gently and for some reason Dean’s reminded of when he had Ellie Hinders straddling his hips when he was sprawled on top of her pale blue duvet, beady-eyed stuffed rabbits looking on as he stripped her of her shirt and she returned the favor. She’d traced a line of licks and pets down his sternum, over his ribs, over his stomach, down, down, down with gentle touches that were almost reverent in nature. More like she was worshipping than seducing.

“There we go,” Sam smiles proudly as he sits back to inspect his handiwork, still cradling Dean’s hand delicately in his.

He looks up and catches the edge of Dean’s lost expression and, God help him, Dean _needs_ to _know_ if Sam’s in this for Dean or if he’s in this for Dean’s perky ass.

He’s already going to hell, if the place actually exists, so fuck it.

Dean bites his lip. Pornographically. Teeth-scraping, tongue-swiping, capillary-bursting _bites_ it. The type of teeth-scraping, tongue-swiping, capillary-bursting lip biting that’s gotten him into many a skirt over the years, gets girls swooning and panties dropping. It’s his standard for attracting, the first step in a dance that’s mostly improvisation and posturing that’s time-tried and held true, and if it doesn’t work on Sam then they’re in the clear. If this doesn’t work then Sam’s just a dumb shit and Dean’s going to kick his ass. If this doesn’t work things get to go back to the way they used to be.

Sam’s hands stall out in their rapturous petting of Dean’s and his eyes track the motion of Dean’s teeth sinking into the swell of his lower lip. The tips of his ears turn red, but it’s not until he looks up and meets Dean’s eyes that his entire face flushes out down to his collarbones.

They stare at each other, and maybe Sam’s looking into Dean but Dean’s trying to look back and all he can see is the fear in Sam’s eyes, that he’s fucking terrified. He’s not looking at Dean’s bounce-a-quarter-off-me ass, or his made-for-sin lips, or his jaw of god damn steel. He’s not looking at any piece of Dean. He’s looking at Dean.

A short sharp squawk from Carrie Fisher breaks the delicacy of the moment. They both turn sharply in their seats just in time to see Leia snap something derisive at Han, pause for a moment of shrewd decision making before lunging forward and kissing Luke square on the mouth.

Sam drops Dean’s hand like he’s been scalded and nearly topples his chair when he stands up.

“Uh,” Sam stammers, hands held out from his body like he had touched something corrosive and disgusting and didn’t want to risk smearing it all over his clothes. “I have to- I’ve gotta-” His eyes flicks from Dean to the wall behind him, the crucifix on the wall. He bolts.

Dean sits, absolutely dumbfounded with revelation.   
  



	5. Part 5

  


  
  
Dean doesn’t realize that he’s waiting for Dr. Okoro to judge him until she doesn’t.

She continues to sit and look at Dean, no identifiable emotion in her face except for interest. Dean pulls at the collar of his shirt and swallows uncomfortably under her observation.

“So,” she starts, satisfied that Dean has no more to say on the subject matter. “Why do you think it was so important for you to know if Sam is attracted to you because of you rather than your looks?”

“I don’t know,” Dean snaps defensively. He realizes intentionally provoking Sam like that wasn’t exactly his crowning moment.

“Do you question why other people are attracted to you?” she inquires.

Dean chews on the inside of his lip. “I don’t care why other people are attracted to me.”

“Why do you think that is?”

_Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick._

“I dunno,” Dean shrugs, crossing his arms over his chest and hitching his shoulders up around his ears.

“Alright,” Dr. Okoro digresses. “May I ask you a different question, then?” The inflection of the ‘k’ on the end of ‘ask’ is a harsh clack after the smooth hiss of the ‘s’.

“Shoot,” Dean prompts.

She’s got firm, intelligent eyes when she looks up straight at Dean and asks, “Have you ever been attracted to Sam as well?”

“I-.” Dean splutters, shock punching him in the stomach hard enough that he coughs and chokes on his own spit. He has to lean forward over his own knees to hack until his airways are clear again. He can feel his face getting hot and turning fuchsia as he struggles for oxygen. “What?” he wheezes.

“Sam,” Dr. Okoro repeats, practically the poster-child for infinite patience. “Have you ever found yourself attracted to him?” she asks simply, no pressure behind the question.

“I-.” Dean starts again, floored by the surrealism of the situation. She was actually asking him if Sam _did it_ for him ever. “I-” he tries again, stalling out a third time. “It was one time and it doesn’t even count!”

-

Sam’s sixteen and their parents are out visiting one of John’s old Marine buddies for the weekend and Dean should have seen it coming.

Dean lost his virginity when he was fifteen to Andrea George under similar circumstances, John and Mary out for the day visiting with Mary’s cousin, Gwen, while she was in town. It had been a little awkward and fumbling on Dean’s part, but Andrea was a pro, pushed him down onto his mattress and told him to hush up while she worked her magic.

Dean had mustered a grin through his nerves (Sex. He was going to have sex. With Andrea fucking George. Wait until he told Sam.) and muttered something honey-sweet before grinding up into her with the intent to make her shudder and gasp.

It was embarrassingly short in duration but on her way out Andrea kissed him and winked, said they’d work on it next time.

Dean walked back to his room to see Sam peeking out of his doorway, eyes wide and confused.

Dean’s the one wide-eyed and confused this time around.

He walked in his room to grab something, he’s sure he did, but Sam’s laughter filtering in through the thin wall distracts him, draws his attention to the sounds of heavy breathing and Charlie asking “Are you sure?”

The bottom of Dean’s skull drops out and his brains leak all down the back of his shirt, because –what?

“Yeah, yeah, c’mon,” Sam whisper-pants back.

“Damn tease,” Charlie rumbles. “Can’t believe you planned this out. Sneaky, sneaky, Sammy.”

Dean’s hand tenses into a fist.

“C’mon, I told you not to call me Sammy, Charlie,” Sam whines. “Especially not now.”

“I know,” Charlie whispers. “Sorry,” he mumbles and the sound is punctuated by the soft, wet sound of open mouthed kisses on dry skin and Sam’s huffed laughter. “Sorry,” kiss, “Sorry,” kiss, “Sorry,” kiss.

“You’re an ass,” Sam chuffs affectionately and Dean can hear sheets rustling.

“Yeah,” Charlie muses and Dean can just imagine the one dimple he has in his left cheek digging in as he shoots Sam a lopsided grin from wherever he’s situated draped over Sam’s bed, or Sam. “But you love me.”

Dean realizes he hasn’t moved a muscle in several long moments, standing statue-still in the center of his own bedroom, staring at the pale blue wall between his room and Sam’s.

“Would you just hurry up?” Sam whines impatiently. 

“Whoa-ho-ho,” Charlie chuckles, “Sam Winchester, pushy bottom, who would have thought?”

Dean’s knees turn into marshmallows without his express permission and he stumbles forward to hit the floor with a muffled thud that they can’t hear on the other side of the wall over the sound of giddy laughter. There’s a roaring in his ears that’s threatening to lay him out flat on his back and a hot, swirling soup of dark feelings low in his stomach that are all telling him to get the fuck in there and drag Charlie out by his hair because he’s touching Sam.

The image rises unbidden behind Dean’s eyes of Sam lying underneath Charlie, thighs splayed wide, naked and pale, a red flush swarming underneath his skin down his neck and over his chest as the embarrassment over his nudity wars with how much he wants. Sam’s wiry now, spindly and bony where he used to be pudgy with baby fat. He’s long and thin, taller than Charlie, as tall as Dean. Dean can just picture it, though. Sam’s pale skin under Charlie’s tan hands, panting and vying and Dean’s feeling lightheaded, he’s sure there was enough air in this room a few minutes ago.

“C’mon,” Sam whines again. “This is worse than the first time you let me blow you, Jesus, Charlie.”

Dean’s ability to string together rational thoughts fractures into millions of infinitesimal shards that get flushed into his veins and clot in his arteries. Oh God, he’s having a heart attack. He’s actually having a heart attack.

“I just don’t want it to hurt,” Charlie promises tenderly, voice muffled and words slurred into Sam’s skin and Sam hums approvingly.

“Hey,” Sam whispers, Dean has to lean in to hear. “I trust you, okay?”

Dean’s going to throw up.

Charlie makes a pleased noise in the back of his throat. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Sam mumbles back, voice gentle and coaxing. “So stop fucking around and get your cock in my ass.”

Dean chokes, stifles the sound by stuffing his fist in his mouth. He should go. He should really, really go.

There’s a long, strangled groan from the other side of the wall, Charlie whispering “It’s okay, you’re okay, you’re perfect, it’s okay,” and Dean should really get the fuck out of there.

“Yeah, yeah, just,” Sam pants, voice high and tight as he wheezes out a gruff laugh that’s not there for his own sake, “gimme a second.”

Dean puts his hands on his face like it’s going to help him hold himself together and thinks ‘That’s what Sam sounds like with a cock up his ass.’ Huh.

“All the time in the world, okay,” Charlie mutters and then the wet, panting sounds of lips mashing and tongues churning fill Dean’s head. “Have I ever told you,” Charlie breaks off, words interspersed with the small, soft _smack_ of him sucking little love bites down Sam’s neck and Dean’s going to scream if he has to look at them later, “about the first time I knew I liked you?”

Sam laughs again, but it’s still a little strained. Probably because, y’know, _he has a cock in his ass._ “No. Tell me.” His voice is high and breathy and Dean doesn’t realize that he’s grinding his cheekbone into the drywall just to try and get closer to the only thing comfortable and right in this whole situation.

“It was after one of your brother’s baseball games,” Charlie whispers like a secret, voice low and intimate and Dean feels like he’s intruding -- knows that he’s intruding. “I was sitting down the bleachers from you and Dean came up to bat and you screamed and you screamed,” he pauses, laughs at the memory and maybe churns his hips if the sound Sam makes is anything to go by. “And then – _whap_ \- he hit this spectacular homerun and the crowd was going _crazy_ but I could still hear you, over everybody else. And after everyone else had calmed down you were still clapping and asking everyone if they’d seen that. It was the sweetest,” the sound of his tongue rasping against the underside of Sam’s jaw is barely a whisper to Dean, “damn thing. I wanted to eat you up.”

There’s something ironic in there, Dean’s just too stupid right now to find out what it is. Give him a minute.

“C’mon,” Sam pants. “I’m ready now, do it.”

Dean presses his ear to the wall, imagines he can hear the slick sound of Charlie pulling out and this is sick and he should leave, but Charlie slams home and the sound Sam makes –fucking keening and desperate- settles like molten sugar in the marrow of Dean’s bones and he’s not going anywhere.

Dean’s front-brain stutters out and goes offline. He pants like an asthmatic, face flushing hot all over and he lets his thoughts wander into the room next door. 

“Oh,” Sam breathes.

“Yeah?” there’s a smirk in Charlie’s voice. “Tell me. You like it?”

“God, God.” The bed springs start to squeal rhythmically. “Oh my God.”

Charlie laughs and Dean just wishes he would shut the fuck up so that he can hear Sam, because Sam sounds sweet- so damn saccharine sweet it’s going to give Dean cavities even though he’s not there to lick it up out of Sam’s mouth. 

“Tell me?” Charlie sounds like he’s trying to make a demand, but it comes out like a question. A meow where there should have been a roar. “Tell me how good it is?”

Dean’s fingers knot into his own hair so hard he would be afraid that he’s going to pull his scalp clean from his skull if he actually had the capacity to be afraid of anything at all.

“Right there,” is all Sam responds with, breathy. “Harder, harder, c’mon,” he pants, needy.

He shouldn’t be needy. He should be blissed. He should be screaming ‘yes, yes, yes’. Christ, doesn’t Charlie know? Harder means _harder._ What part of that isn’t he _getting_ as Sam continues to make those choked off, unfulfilled noises.

This isn’t what Sam needs. He’s desperate, wanting, and he’s not getting.

Dean knows. Dean knows that he needs rough, claiming, possessive. He needs it like he needs everything in life- a little bit punishing.

Charlie can get the job done, if the random “C’mon, c’mon”s interrupted with “Yes!”s are anything to go by, but he’s not doing it _right._ Not in a way that’s going to leave Sam panting and sweating with the dull thrum of a fucking fantastic orgasm radiating from his spine outwards.

The fact that Sam can blurt “Fuck me like you mean it!” after the actual fucking is well underway is indicative to the fact that Sam is not having hot, stupid sex.

Sam deserves some fucking _idiotic_ sex. Sam deserves to be flushed out, blissed out, fucked out. Sam deserves to not be able to use his tongue properly do to post-coital senselessness.

Dean presses his cheek to the wall and listens. Time could have turned into potatoes and he wouldn’t have noticed for all the attention he’s paying to it. All that matters is this bone-deep hunger pooling heavily in Dean’s gut that doesn’t feel like a complete and total stranger to him and the pitched, breathy keen of Sam on the other side of the wall.

This is fucked up, Dean thinks as he grinds his mouth into the drywall, lips bruising. This is really fucked up.

Sam comes virgin-fast and Dean has to press himself against the wall to hear the soft sound he makes. He just wishes Charlie would stop with the “I’ve got you, so perfect, Sam, Sam,”s because he can’t fucking _hear._ Leave it to Chuck Patton to fuck Dean over even when he’s fucking Sam. Or fuck Dean over because he’s fucking Sam. Either way he’s cutting off the delicate sound of Sam’s coming, and Dean is unappreciative.

It hits Dean like a punch to the chest and is converted somewhere in his brain into smelted lead that seeps down the line of his spine to settle in his pelvis and Dean has to stuff his hands between his thighs and squeeze his knees together because no fucking way is he going to lose it over the tinny sound Sam makes when he comes. He bites his lip swollen to keep from making a sympathetic gasp.

Sam’s voice gives out to pants and the bed springs keep creaking and Dean has to _go._

Car keys.

He came in here to get his keys.

He can’t keep his legs organized underneath of him when he scrambles up to the dresser, ends up hitting his knee on the corner of his bed and has to limp out the door, nearly taking the lamp on the dresser with him.

The sound of the mattress echoes in his head and he blatantly refuses to touch his cock, even if the inseam of his jeans is imprinting itself in his groin at this point.

It’s natural, he thinks. Like listening to porn. He loves porn. Porn is great. Just because he sorta got revved and ready listening to his brother get off doesn’t mean that porn is any less awesome. Yeah. It’s not like he was even in the room with them either, he didn’t see anything. He was on the other side of the wall. It doesn’t count. Just sex noises triggering his hind brain. It’s practically Pavlov. Dogs drooling, erections popping up, bells, sex moans- it’s all the same. It doesn’t count.

Dean drives out twenty minutes as he sweats and tries not to think about it, hits up the first bar he sees, doesn’t order a drink because he forgot his wallet and his fake ID on his dresser.

He’s like a bad joke.

A kid with a boner walks into a bar, finds the first girl with with shorter dark hair, long, long legs, and dimples that he sees and fucks her in the back seat of his car.

He doesn’t ask for her name but he tells her his so that he can hear her scream it as he fucks her hard and fast and dirty in the backseat of the Impala, suspension squealing as the car rocks in time with the rolling of his hips into her. He whispers filth into her ear the entire time about how she’s not going to need anyone after him, how he’s going to take care of her and make her feel so good, better than anyone else.

The punch-line is how he hopes her name is Pammy or Tammy or something.

-

Dean gets home late. Early, rather.

He shrugs off his coat, shoves his shoes under the table, and pads his way into the kitchen to get a drink and fully does not expect to find Charlie still in his house, let alone curled up on Dean’s _fucking couch._

Charlie hovers a finger over his mouth over the back of the couch, indicating Dean should keep it down, and then gestures down to the lump slumped into his side which Dean figures out is Sam when it snuffles and wriggles closer into Charlie’s warmth.

Dean’s drawn down to the family room like he and Sam are made of magnets and Dean’s the negative and Sam’s the positive. He stands off to the side and watches Charlie lay a gentle hand on the back of Sam’s head.

“He really is something, y’know,” Charlie mumbles, staring down at Sam.

Dean knows. He wonders if Charlie has any idea.

-

Sam and Charlie last through the end of the school year. Charlie goes to college and the sex isn’t good enough to justify not seeing other people.

-

The next year passes and Sam takes his SATs and ACTs and APs and a shit load of other acronyms Dean never bothered with.

Stanford gives him a full scholarship.

One thousand eight hundred and fifty two miles away from Dean.

Dean wants to be happy for him. Dean wants a lot of things.

Sam looks at him sometimes and Dean knows that when he leaves he’s not ever coming back.   
  



	6. Part 6

  


  
  
They sit in silence again, Dean and Zora both waiting on the other to make the first move and interrupt the _tick, tick, tick, tick_ of the clock on the wall. They watch each other, two predators hunting for a subtle weakness to gain some upper-hand in this six hour long synopsis of Dean Winchester’s life. Dean’s not sure of much other than if he wins this argument nothing changes, he goes home, he goes to bed, and he’ll listen to Sam from the other side of a wall.

If Zora wins…

He doesn’t know what happens if Zora wins.

She clears her throat and Dean can breathe again.

“You know,” she says as she shifts in her seat, switching which leg is crossed over the other, “I used to live in Africa.” Af-ree-kah, she says.

Dean raises his eyebrows in a condescending ‘Ya’ don’t say!’ gesture mostly to distract from the fact that he’s stunned that they’re just not going to talk about this. He has arguments lined up and well-rehearsed, and they’re just going to skip over the fact that Dean was a shameless hand-jive away from perving all over his little brother? It didn’t count because Dean never touched himself. It didn’t count because he didn’t see. It didn’t count because it didn’t fucking _count_. 

She levels a look on him of grand significance, conveying that she is being absolutely, from-the-core-of-her-being serious and he composes himself and mumbles a short apology.

She nods and continues.

“My brother and I were born in the Congo, but my mother brought us to Nigeria when we were both young. She made us go to school where they taught us English, but we never spoke it at home. Adjusting was difficult for me. My brother was very good at it, but I was not.” She shrugs and rubs her palms down her thighs. “We could not know it at the time because we were so small, but there was war around us. Our government was corrupt, run by people who did not have the interests of the people in their heads when they took the responsibility. Many people were very displeased and very vocal. I was sixteen when a riot in the streets took my brother’s life in front of my eyes. Do you know what his last words to me were?”

Even if Dean could guess, his mouth is too dry to say.

She smiles at him, a little sad and a little bitter. “Don’t cry.” She pauses, letting that sink in. Her lips tremble for a moment and Dean’s breathless with the enormity of the situation, that she’s letting him see back into her after he’s bared all for her. He wonders if therapists are allowed to do this- then remembers that he’s not in therapy.

“Do you know what I did?” Dr. Okoro asks softly.

Dean shakes his head.

“I wept.” She nods simply. “I wept for days. He asked me not to, with his dying words, and I could not give him that. He would rob me of my grief with his last breath, and I would not have it. My grief was mine and he would not take it from me, could not, because he was dead. Do you understand?”

He’s not sure what he’s supposed to be understanding.

She snorts through her nose and apparently her endless well of patience has finally run dry because she leans forward, nearly aggressive, and asks “Sam is dying in your arms and his last words to you are ‘Do not cry!’ what do you do, Dean?”

“I-.” Dean stammers. “I don’t know!” He tries to imagine it, holding Sam upright in the mud in the middle of nowhere with blood on his hands and none of it’s his and Sam whispers in his ear ‘Don’t cry, don’t you fucking cry for me.’ 

“What do you do?” she demands.

“Anything he asks!” he snaps back defensively. “Jesus! If he wanted me to fucking tap dance, I would!”

“But he is your brother, Dean.” Dr. Okoro reminds him. “You would not mourn your brother if he asked you?”

“God.” He scrubs a hand through his hair and thinks about it again. Sam’s chin on his shoulder and his legs folder up underneath him and Dean’s holding them both upright by the skin of his teeth and Sam’s lips bump his ear when he tells him not to cry. “It’s… if it’s the last damn thing he wants in the world from me, I’d give him anything.” He swallows hard. “He doesn’t want me to cry? I man the hell up because…”

“Because why?” She leans forward even farther into his space, grinding her heels into the carpet.

“Because it doesn’t matter!” Dean shouts. “It doesn’t matter what I feel! Nothing about me matters unless Sam-” he chokes off.

Unless Sam _what_ , he thinks frantically.

Unless Sam approves, loves him back?

Nothing about him _matters_ without Sam. Everything important about him, everything good and significant that makes up Dean Winchester is something Sam Winchester helped him put there. Dean loves him enough that if Sam told him not to cry about him dying, he wouldn’t cry. Because Sam asked him. Because Sam comes before he does.

He’d lasso the moon, reverse the earth’s rotation, hold a damn boom-box aloft while standing outside his window, conquer just about every other movie cliché he can think up and then make up a few more if Sam needed him to.

Whatever he wants comes second to Sam. Not even what Sam wants, but what Sam needs to be safe and healthy and, ideally, happy. Always has. Dean’s entertained the selfish yearning to keep Sam recently, and the want for things to go back to the way things were when they were children and he was father, mother, hero, idol, sun and stars to Sam, but if Sam left Dean wouldn’t follow him. 

What do I want, Dean thinks.

He’s on the brink of some revelation, he thinks, when Dr. Okoro throws in “What do you think Sam would do if the situations were reversed?”

Dean doesn’t have to think. He knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that Sam would rather die than put himself before Dean, has actually attempted to before.

He exhales.

Dr. Okoro settles back in her chair and steeples her fingers on her knee.

“I’m supposed to look out for him.” The air wheezes out of Dean’s lungs, thick and slow like molasses. His eyes burn like acid. “It’s not supposed to be like this. I’m supposed to protect him from bad stuff. Not- not like this. We’re not supposed to be- nobody should be like this.” He grinds the heels of his hands into his eyes until it hurts. “No wonder he’s so pissed at me.”

“Have you ever considered,” Dr. Okoro interjects, “that Sam was never upset with you because you had corrupted him, but more because you blamed yourself for things about him that you had no control over?”

Dean coughs up a reedy, thin laugh. “Aren’t you supposed to be discouraging this shit?”

“I am not here to tell you that there is something wrong with you, Dean.” She straightens her glasses on her nose. “I will not prescribe you medication or tell you what to do to make yourself what you think you should be; normal or better or anything other than Dean. I am here to help you live with yourself, Dean. I cannot, will not, encourage you to be something or to do something you do not want. You are you. Sam is Sam. You make yourself. Not me, not your father, not Mr. Gambol. Not anyone else. Your sorrows and your joys are yours to make and keep, whoever you make them with and wherever you keep them is up to you. You have control. You are your own master.”

He doesn’t know what to say. Dr. Zora Okoro shakes his hand and turns him out back into the world.

He doesn’t know if he lost the argument or not.

-

The door clicks shut softly behind him as Dean steps into the foyer of the home he's lived in all his life. The air is stagnant, stale in a way that speaks to his father’s anal-retentive tyranny over the thermostat. He toes off his boots and socks and stuffs them under the hall table like his mother's been telling him not to do since he was six. The worn soft wood in the hall is chilly under his feet as he pads his way to the kitchen. It should feel familiar after years and years, but everything's different now. Everything's changed.

And Dean would be lying if he said that he wasn't piss terrified.

He exhales a sigh and shoulders his way into the kitchen.

The pale light stretches across the kitchen floor from the family room, volume of the television cranked down so low Dean hadn't heard it from the front hall. The single step bridging the kitchen and the family room creaks slightly when he goes down to investigate. 

The electric blue light flickers across Sam features, alternately bathing him in radiance and dancing shadows across the planes and slopes of his body. Dean doesn't try and stop himself from chasing the shadows with his eyes down the dip of his spine as he breathes slow and even in his sleep. Somewhere between sixteen and eighteen Sam's shoulders decided that they needed to be wide enough to carry all the burdens he packs on his back, but his hips never got the memo, still narrow and slender. His legs go on and on and on for miles, a twisting and curling road that tucks up against his chest in a hairpin curve that Dean would have taken at 50mph in the Impala, tires squealing and radio blaring. His long hair puffs and deflates with his breath, nose crushed into the back of the sofa. 

Dean wonders for a moment what it’s like to work at The Louvre, or the Sydney Opera House, to sweep the floors around the Hagia Sophia, drive across the Golden Gate Bridge every morning to get to work, look at the Empire State Building outside of your office window, to teach scuba lessons in the Great Barrier Reef, or have the Aurora Borealis touch the air outside of your house. Do they ever forget how wonderful the things they see every day are?

Do they ever catch themselves staring and realize that, oh – _oh-_ this is amazing. This is spectacular! This is beautiful! Somebody! Somebody, come look at this! Come look at how beautiful this is! Come look and see how wonderful this is! Come watch! It’s important, it’s so important!

Because that’s how Dean’s feeling right now. 

A faint smile touches Sam’s mouth and he hums contentedly as Dean stares on, flexing his feet comfortably before settling again. 

Dean stares at his toes. He doesn't know why, but he does. They're there. Long and knobby and gross but cute in the way that toes are sometimes prone to be. They don't look like the chubby baby toes Dean used to blow raspberries against eighteen years ago. He glances up to Sam's hands. Long, strong fingers wind up in a blanket that's half on the couch. Those aren't the little fists that tried to pry off his nose when he was four. Except they are. Those hands got as big as Dean's hands. Those hands got as big as John's hands. Those hands got bigger. 

Jesus Christ, Dean thinks. Somewhere along the way Sam's gone and grown up on him.

The realization is crippling. It's what Sam's been trying to tell him since he was fourteen, what Dr. Zora Okoro has been trying to trick him into discovering all day, and he connects the god damn dots staring at Sam's toes. 

"Fuck." He scrubs his hands through his hair, scratching roughly at his scalp. "Fuck." His blood's pumping now, heart pounding and he doesn't know what that means. 

He hasn't lost Sam. 

Sam's right there on the couch. 

He hasn't ruined Sam.

Sam's right there. Asleep and alive. 

Sam just grew up without him. 

Dean takes a deep breath and steels himself, because he fully intends on catching up. 

"Sam." His voice is glass-gargling rough and his hand shakes when he reaches out and jostles Sam's shoulder gently. "Sammy."

Sam wuffs and stirs, eyes blinking open blearily. A lazy smile smooths over his lips as he focuses on Dean above him. "Hey," he mumbles and stretches. "Did you just get home, man? 'S late." 

"Yeah." Dean's fingers twitch uncomfortably with the urge to card through Sam's sleep tousled hair and feel. "Sorry. I didn't think you'd be waiting up for me or I would have come home sooner."

"'S okay," Sam assures, lazy smile lingering. "What'd Dr. O want?" He tucks his legs up higher so that Dean has space to sit on the couch.

“Just to talk about some stuff.” Dean settles next to Sam, cushions still sleep warm underneath of him, sinking through him to penetrate his bones.

“Yeah?” He props himself up on his elbows. “What kinda stuff?”

“You kinda stuff.” Dean sighs.

Sam fidgets and clears his throat uncomfortably. “Anything in particular?” He tries to smile but the corners of his lips twitch spastically. Sam’s always had a shit poker face.

Dean smiles fondly and scrubs a hand through his own hair. “No,” he says and he’s not even sure if he’s lying. “Just…stuff.”

Sam gnaws slightly at the corner of his mouth and Dean watches unabashedly, fingers twitching.

“Oh. Okay,” Sam says awkwardly once he figures out that Dean’s not going to expand. They sit together in the static light of the television for a few more beats before Sam clears his throat and scrubs his palms down his thighs. “I guess I’m gonna head to bed then.”

The moment’s slipping away faster than Dean can keep track of and Sam’s unfolding his body from the couch and taking his warmth with him when he gets up to leave. His knees creak and pop when he stands, disks of his spine realigning with a crackle when he straightens out and the moment is dancing away.

They both startle when Dean’s hand reaches out and wraps around Sam’s wrist, stilling him.

“Dean?” is all Sam has time to get about before Dean stands up without the leisure of stretching and popping back into alignment and presses his lips into his brother’s.

He’s not sure what he was expecting, to be honest. He hadn’t really planned any farther ahead than this and was really just too shocked that their faces hadn’t simply repelled one another by some holy force to do anything more than to hold his mouth to Sam’s in a soft press of dry, sensitive skin. Sam’s rigid against him and that’s no good, Dean realizes. He opens his eyes and sees Sam staring at him.

Their lips catch and stick when Dean pulls away and Sam’s still staring at him, eyes wide and chest heaving at a rapidly growing pace that speaks of a fast track to hyperventilation.

“Sam.” Dean’s voice is a rough grating sound coughed up from the back of his throat as the fear that maybe he’s read this wrong seizes the base of his spine. Maybe he’s made up everything; maybe Sam fixed himself and fell out of love with his brother somewhere along the way. A cold sweat breaks out across the back of his neck and he feels a bit like crying because, oh god, he just-

“Dean?” Sam rasps. His pulse jumps visibly in his neck, a shiny cold sweat beading at his hairline. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

Dean opens his mouth to blurt something stupid like ‘Incest. What are _you_ doing?’ but then he looks at Sam, really _looks_ at him and how his bottom lip trembles. His eyes are flayed open and raw and Dean can _see_ for the first time in four years every single thought running through Sam’s head and, god, it feels like being able to breathe again. Even as Dean watches a steel cold rage clouding over Sam’s face he can’t bring himself to regret a single second.

“You can’t just fuck with me like that!” Sam shouts, voice tight and eyes glossy as he shoves Dean quick and hard in the chest. “You think this is fucking funny?”

His hands are at Sam’s face, cupping and clutching reverently before Sam can even finish the sentence. “No! God, no!” Sam’s thin fingers curl around his wrists and Dean’s not sure whether he wants him to stop touching or never leave. “I would never- Jesus, Sam- how could you think…” Too many thoughts stumble around inside his head all at once and he blunders over the notion that Sam could even consider the idea that he was _joking_ about this- whatever the hell they were doing. Like he was playing some practical joke by kissing his brother and was just going to wait until Sam kissed back until he could shout ‘Gothcha!’ “Jesus, Sam.”

Sam’s fingers dig into his wrists, pressing Dean’s hands harder into his jaw like an anchor as he trembles and fights against a looming panic attack.

“C’mon, breathe for me, Sammy,” Dean smiles weakly and runs the rough pads of his thumbs up over Sam’s high cheekbones. “Deep breaths.” He demonstrates exaggeratedly. Sam gives him a watery laugh that more for Dean’s comfort than actual substance, but he doesn’t let go of his wrists so Dean counts it as a win.

They stand like that for a few long moments, clinging to one another in the electric shadows cast by the television, breathing together until Sam can say “You don’t want this. Not really.”

Sam doesn’t see the smirk that coils up the corners of Dean’s lips because his eyes are closed, like he’s steeling himself for rejection.

“Yeah?” Dean sounds smug even in his own ears. “Why don’t you just let me decide that?”

This time when Dean kisses Sam it’s a bit more spectacular mostly because after a few blank second Sam starts to kiss him back, albeit tentatively. Dean obligates himself to pick up the slack, presses forward and coaxes. Sam’s slow, stiff, sluggish to react. Dean knows Sam is a fully functional kisser, if Charlie’s dazed looks are any tip off, but he’s holding back now.

“What are you afraid of?” Dean asks, the very inside of his lips catch-dragging over Sam’s in the bare millimeters between them, because he’s genuinely curious why Sam’s freezing up now, of all times.

“Eternal damnation? Getting lynched?” Sam’s laugh has a manic hysteria edging in on it and the gust of exhaled air that comes with it burns down the length of Dean’s neck. “I don’t know.”

“Then kiss me back.” Dean nips lightly at Sam’s bottom lip.

“We’re brothers, Dean,” Sam breathes into his mouth, like he needs reminding.

“Yeah, Sam.” He knocks their noses together gently. “Yeah, we are.” 

When Sam’s dam breaks, it breaks hard.

Dean’s shoved down hard back onto the couch, landing with a muffled ‘oof’ that Sam smothers on his lips as he climbs into his lap, straddling his thighs. His tongue spirals into Dean’s mouth, hot and wet and demanding. All Dean can do is knot his fingers into the back of Sam’s shirt, his hair, and hold on. There’s teeth nipping and tongues dancing and fingers clutching and it clicks in Dean’s head that Sam’s wanted and waited for this for four years. Maybe longer. He’s wanted this with every breath of him and given up everything to make sure that he didn’t get it, and then Dean just offers it up like it’s no big deal.

It is a big deal.

It is a very big deal.

It would be a very big deal if they weren’t related. It would be a very big deal if they weren’t related and one of them was a woman.

This: Dean hooking his arm around his little brother’s back and pulling him forward so that they can rock and flex together, sharing air and space; this is a very big deal.

“Jesus, Sam,” Dean breathes.

“Is this okay?” Sam tenses, ready to be up and off and apologizing to Dean frantically for pushing too hard or too quickly or even at all at the very hint of any discomfort whatsoever.

“Yeah, yeah.” Dean nods quickly. “I just… Jesus, Sam.”

Sam’s eyes -foxish, slanted and colored every natural color the world has to offer, mundane and exotic alike- flick over Dean’s face and Dean watches the recognition bleed in to his expression as Sam registers that his tone was one of awe rather than whatever negative thing Sam thought was lurking under his tongue.

Dean pants out a breath and kisses the underside of Sam’s jaw reverently. Sam’s fingers flex and clench into his biceps

“Tell me,” Sam rasps and Dean can feel the words vibrate in his throat through his lips. “Tell me about how much you want this. Please, Dean.”

“You wanna know?” Dean rumbles and listens as a dark, heady thread of something feral possessive weaves into his tone. He gets two handfuls of Sam’s ass and kneads hard enough that he starts to get high off the idea of his handprints bruising there, aching dully every time Sam sits down for the next week like a neon sign that says ‘DEAN WAS HERE’. “You wanna know about how fucking crazy you make me? How I don’t know who I am without you? How the only goddamn thing in this whole world I _want,_ ” he punctuates the word by rolling his hips up into Sam and Sam makes a wrecked sound and neither of them are fully hard yet- not enough foreplay yet, but they’re sure as hell not soft either- they grind together until they get there, “Is you?”

He rocks up into the thick, hot line of Sam’s dick, locking together so that he’s rubbing up into the notch of Sam’s hipbone and Sam’s got the inner crease of his thigh to bear down into.

“Yes.” Sam puffs into his ear. His hands tremble as they trace over Dean’s body, roaming restlessly. “ _God_ , yes.”

Something about the statement strikes him the exact wrong way and Dean bites down on Sam’s collarbone hard enough that Sam’s head snaps back and he cries out.

“God doesn’t belong here,” Dean growls and shakes his head like a wild animal, snorting furiously as he remembers Gambol’s words and the nightmares and the crucifix in the kitchen. “Not between you and me, Sam. We’ve gotten this far without Him, I’ll take you to the fucking gates of Hell and burn them down if that’s the way it has to be, but don’t you bring Him here. Not right now when it’s just you and me.”

Sam exhales, one hand massaging at the back of Dean’s neck as the other cards up into his hair. He quirks his head to the side. Something old and sad lingers in the back of his eyes as he looks Dean over, long and slow, takes him in piece by piece. “You don’t believe in God, Dean,” he says softly. “What does it matter?”

“You do.” Dean ducks forward underneath Sam’s inspection and presses his lips to the corner of his mouth, letting them smear into the growing curve and a hesitant smile and he mumbles, “It matters.” He takes Sam’s lower lip between his teeth and finally gets to taste one of those sweet puppy noises he heard a year ago, and it’s as addictive as he thought it would be.

“Mm,” Sam makes a surprised hum and rocks down into Dean involuntarily when his hips jerk and roll, the denim of their jeans rasping together over their hard cocks. “Dean, Dean,” Sam pants into Dean’s mouth, “Dean, wait.”

Dean freezes. 

“I just,” Sam breathes heavily and drags his lower lip back into his own possession and unhooks Dean’s hands from digging possessively into his hipbones –when the shit did that happen?- and holds onto them so Dean can’t try to push Sam off or pull Sam in. Neutral territory. As neutral as territory where his little brother is straddling his lap and making small aborted churning motions like he just can’t help scraping the bitter-sweet edge of needy pressure by grinding their cocks together can get.

“What do you want out of this?” Sam demands seriously, like Dean telling him that he was kicking God out and inviting Sam in wasn’t commitment enough or something. Like he didn’t just make Sam his religion. “I need to know now so I don’t get… excited or anything, I guess.” Sam’s mouth is pink and wet around the words, and Dean wants it back on his pronto. Better yet, wants to see it stretched obscenely around his cock as Sam looks up at him through his eyelashes and Dean whispers mud and filth about how pretty he looks.

So, in for a penny, in for an incestuous pound.

“Would you let me fuck you?” Dean asks, voice deceptively conversational because the idea simultaneously thrills and scares the fucking shit out of him.

Sam’s hands clench down on his as his cock tries to strangle itself against Dean’s thigh and his eyes roll back in his head slightly, every muscle in his body strung tight like a violin string about to snap. “Shit, Dean,” he gasps. The red staining high on his cheekbones highlights his darks eyes and Dean thinks it’s a very, very good look on him. “You can’t just say shit like that to me!”

“What?” Dean chuckles darkly, voice like thick cigarette smoke in one of those bars he’s always hunting for someone to share his bed with who’s good enough, Sam enough, to keep around. “Not even when I mean it?”

Sam’s thighs tense and he starts to rock into Dean with earnest. Little half-whines that Dean’s sure Sam doesn’t even know he’s making leak out from his throat, tinny and tight with wanting.

In that moment where Sam’s distracted Dean tilts up his hips and yanks on Sam’s grip over his hands and Sam topples into his chest. Dean’s arms are steel vices around Sam’s back as he holds him there like a ragdoll, sucks a bruise into the back hinge of his jaw that Sam might have to explain to somebody later and Dean wants to be there to watch him stammer and flush.

“Wanna fuck you,” Dean grits out.

“Have you ever even been with a dude?” Sam laughs tightly again, fingers trembling on Dean’s shoulders and hips rolling with Dean’s. His pupils are eating away the color is his eyes, making him look feral with this tacky, sludgy thing mucking up the air between them that makes it hard to breathe or think or move. 

“Can’t be too different from anal with a chick,” Dean snorts. “Assholes are assholes.”

Sam makes a face and Dean wants to laugh at the fact that Sam has the capacity to be affronted by Dean’s crassness when he’s humping his brother into a couch.

He stifles a smile into the slope of Sam’s shoulder, sucks another few marks there to disguise it. “C’mon, Sammy. I’ll give it to you like you need it, yeah? Hard and fast so you can feel me later, give you bruises so you’ll remember that I was there.”

“Fuck.” Sam’s voice is airy and thin. “I just- we have to- my bedroom, now, c’mon.”

They fumble to the floor together, hissing and writhing until Dean drags them upright, the stitches of Sam’s shirt popping as he knuckles his collar and hauls them both into a position bipedal enough for them to stumble the way to the front hallway before Sam’s pressed to the wall and Dean’s got a hand fisted in his stupid long hair, tracing over the scar just behind his ear. Sam’s hands slide up underneath his shirt and feel like branding irons on his stomach, burning Sam’s fingerprints into his skin so that anything with eyes can see. They’re not so much kissing anymore as they are mouthing and panting at each other as they grind and grope.

“Shit,” Sam cusses. “No, no, c’mon, bedroom.”

“Right,” Dean grumbles as he maps out a tender spot behind Sam’s ear that makes him shudder down to his knees.

They stagger through Sam’s door after the two tries it takes them to coordinate a single-file path through the doorframe that won’t fit the width of both their shoulders at once.

“When did you know?” Sam asks and Dean thinks he’s being intentionally vague just to piss him off.

“Know-” Dean starts to ask, but doesn’t like his mouth being away from Sam’s skin long enough to finish the question, so takes a short hickey break between that and, “What?”

“That you wanted this?” Sam pushes him down on the mattress and tugs at his shirt like he’s offended that Dean’s still wearing it.

“When did _you_?” Dean snaps back, and he would be blushing if he weren’t already flushed all to hell.

“I was twelve,” Sam mutters half into the sheets as leans over the side of the bed so far that Dean has to catch his hips to keep him up on the mattress as he sifts through the dirty socks and stray pens that have accumulated under there. “We were at the beach and I couldn’t stop staring at the freckles on your back. And, like, I kept wanting to touch them, I guess. So I kissed one on your shoulder and you laughed and dunked me in the ocean and we had to share a bed in the motel room and I woke up so hard I couldn’t think straight and I wanted to throw up. So...” He glances over his shoulder at Dean, one arm still under the bed.

It hits Dean all over again how long Sam’s lived with this _thing_ and how clueless he was, is.

“Yeah?” he asks, mouth dry. “That’s…a while ago, Sam.” He’s so behind in this game he’s pretty sure he should get some sort of sympathetic handicap.

Sam tenses slightly underneath him and Dean buries his nose into the valley of his spine and nuzzles gently through the soft worn fabric of the t-shirt that Dean isn’t entirely sure wasn’t his own at some point in time, assuring Sam that’s it’s okay. Everything is okay.

“Do you remember when you and Charlie started dating?” Dean asks absently; thumb slipping up under the back of Sam’s shirt to stroke at the warm, smooth dip of his lower back. “You two’d go out to the movies or something and you’d be gone forever. Dad told me he was going to tie me down if I didn’t stop pacing every time you left the damn house. You’d get home and it’d be dark and you’d be all… kissed. Your hair’d be all messed up and you’d have this stupid look on your face.”

Sam shoots him another look over his shoulder, eyebrows hitched together in confusion. Dean can feel the coil and release of the muscles in his back like they’re rolling right out of Sam and into him.

“I didn’t like it.”

Sam sits up, feels like a cresting wave underneath Dean’s hands, and kisses him full on the mouth, demands Dean let him in and give back every ounce of bruising attention he’s getting.

“Shit, Sam,” Dean pants.

“Clothes off, c’mon,” Sam huffs, stripping off his shirt, and Dean notices for the first time that he’s scrounged up a bottle of lube from under his bed. One of the cheap KY tubes from the drug store with the loopy fonts that Dean’s sure must appeal to some sort of demographic, but he can’t fathom who. The tube’s mostly full, Dean notes, but he doesn’t know whether he’s feeling smug that Charlie couldn’t put a dent in the small bottle or pissed that he’d even gotten that far.

“ _Clothes, Dean,_ ” Sam intones impatiently as he shimmies out of his jeans and snatches the lube back up off the comforter.

The groan that tears itself out of Dean’s chest when Sam’s cock slaps up against his stomach, hard and wet and fucking gorgeous, is practically animal and Sam shudders with it, goosebumps rising all over his flushed skin. Sam’s mouth tastes faintly of cherry soda and cheese pizza, his neck tastes like skin and sin, his shoulders taste like sunshine and sweat, his torso tastes like the novelty spearmint and eucalyptus soap in the shower, and his cock tastes like bitter and wrong and good and hot and Dean’s not gonna stop.

“Dean,” Sam whines, hands kneading into Dean’s shoulders because he doesn’t know whether to push his brother away or pull him closer as Dean tests the tastes and textures of everything against his tongue and lips. His thighs twitch and jump when Dean sucks at the head, licks up the pearl of precome shamelessly despite the bitterness he’s not sure he likes with a dirty, dark rumble low in his throat that gets Sam jolting and grinding his heels into the mattress.

Dean’s hands roam, up over Sam’s stomach, down the insides of his thighs, up underneath the smooth skin behind his knees, the curve of his calves, all those places that would have been a little bit strange, a little bit blasphemous for him to want to touch before. But, he figures he’s got Sam’s dick in his mouth, he’s allowed to feel up Sam’s ankles if he wants.

“Dean, c’mon,” Sam whines. “I don’t wanna come like this yet! You promised!”

And it’s the funniest damned thing. Dean’s got Sam’s dick in his mouth and Sam’s whining like he’s still eleven and he’s waiting impatiently for Dean to kiss his booboos better so he can go back outside and play. That should freak him out. That should really freak him out.

“Sorry, sorry,” Dean buries his forehead in Sam’s thigh, breathes in deep so that he won’t ever forget what Sam smells like when he needs him, wants him more than anything. His cock jerks, trapped and contorted uncomfortably in the confines of his jeans and practically getting rubbed raw with all the unconscious air-fucking Dean’s getting nowhere with except to rut against the abrasive cotton of his boxers. “Just had to.” He sucks a small welt into the joint of Sam’s hip and pulls back to watch the ovular patch of skin he’d latched on to flush and knows that it will purple and bruise before the hour’s out.

“Fuck,” Sam whimpers and fidgets. “Dean, please.”

“Yeah, yeah, okay,” Dean tugs the lube out from Sam’s stiff fingers. “I’ve got you, Sam. Gonna take care of you, promise. It’s okay. Everything’s okay.”

He’s done this a few times before. Not enough to make him a certifiable expert or anything, but Dean would be lying if he said that he didn’t know his way around an asshole, alright. There’s no delicate way to put it.

He ducks one shoulder under Sam’s knee and Sam lets his other leg fall away, opens himself up so Dean can see everything.

Dean runs his hands down the smooth skin of Sam’s inner thighs, rough mechanic’s callouses scraping gently against pale flesh. Dean’s mouth waters.

“Stop fucking around,” Sam growls as his hands twist anxiously into the sheets and Dean stifles a smile in the inside of his knee.

“Bossy, bossy.”

The lube smells of nothing in particular while still having a palpable aroma when Dean pops the cap and slicks up two fingers.

“Come on,” Sam wriggles impatiently and Dean realizes that reasonably the best way to shut him up is to keep his mouth occupied and sets about doing just that, tonguing and fingering Sam open as he writhes like a live wire. Sam’s hot on the inside. Hot and smooth like velvet and Dean wants to tell him how perfect and pink and pretty he looks spreading open for Dean’s fingers, how he’ll look better spreading for his dick, but he thinks Sam might tease him for trying to wax dirty poetic at a time like this. It doesn’t stop Dean from thinking it, though. 

“Mm,” Sam hums impatiently into Dean’s mouth and shoves back into his hand insistently, and six years, Dean thinks. Six fucking years Sam’s wanted this. 

“I know, I know,” Dean soothes with his tone and the hand he doesn’t have rocking up into Sam. “I got you.”

Sam makes the sound that’s the bastard child of a whimper and a scream, Dean’s name caught in the limbo between his lungs and his throat and only eking out as a wordless tremble. “Hurry up,” he breathes. “Just, _please_ , Dean.”

Six years. Fuck.

“Soon, soon, promise.” Dean’s fingers pump harder into the slick, tight heat of Sam, mapping out the impossible smoothness as a muscle in the back of his hand cramps up and he tries to really wrap his brain around the idea that he’s _inside_ Sam. Sam’s spreading out for him, opening up wide so that Dean can slot home and fuck into him, _show_ him how much he loves, wants, needs; make him _feel_ everything that Dean feels; make it good; make it perfect. The idea is volcanic in his veins, roaring hot and addictive through his body. “I don’t want it to hurt.” His fingers curl and skate around something dense that’s got Sam going taut and cussing up a blue streak in his ear. 

“Want it to hurt,” Sam pants, hot and damp into Dean’s ear as he wriggles uncontrollably. “Want to feel you later, Dean. I don’t want to fucking walk straight after this is over, and if you can’t do that for me-”

Dean’s growl cuts him off and he should _not_ be letting Sam talk him out of a decent prep job. He should _not_ be shucking off his jeans, kicking and flailing idiotically until he can shimmy them down to his knees and toe them off violently. He should _not_ be burying his forehead into Sam’s shoulder and asking “Condom?”

Sam ducks and noses at the underside of his jaw, panting humidly into his neck. “No, no. Just you.”

Dean wants to chew at his lower lip and think it over –he doesn’t have anything, but Sam doesn’t know that and Sam’s only ever been with one guy before and if Charlie gave Sam anything Dean’s going to fucking _skin him_ \- but Sam takes care of that for him, sinking his teeth into the swell of his lip and suckling at it and it’s like he’s got his mouth around Dean’s cock instead for all it’s doing to Dean’s ability to think clearly. The thought of being inside Sam, all of that hot and slick and smooth and wet bearing down at him from all angles without the thin barrier of latex between them almost has him rutting into Sam’s hip and blowing it like he hasn’t since he was a kid.

Sam sits up, takes Dean with him and flips them to that he’s on top, smiling deviously, and Dean maybe starts to babble a little bit when he gets a hand around his poor neglected dick – tacky slick with lube and who gives a shit when Sam got a hold of the bottle- and tosses a leg over Dean’s hips, effectively pinning and straddling him again.

“Shit. Shit, Sam! You gonna ride me?” Dean blathers. “Gonna fuck yourself on me, huh? Do it how you like it?”

A wounded sound gets punched out of Sam’s stomach and he curls in on himself slightly for a moment, fighting for control. The sensual roll of his hips when he goes up to his knees over top of Dean is going to drive him absolutely insane. Dean has to touch as Sam lines himself up, his hands smearing sweat and lube and saliva as he palms at Sam’s sides. His hands look so big when he slides them up Sam’s hips, traces the wings of his hipbones, feels his way up and up and up until he’s got his fingers slotting into the grooves of Sam’s ribs and he can feel the flex and span of them as they warp naturally to make room for his lungs. He feels each little hitch of breath and puppy dog noise transmitted through his fingers.

The lamp on Sam’s night table gleams harshly against Sam’s sweat glazed body and Dean watches every muscle rise and fall out of sharp definition as the glide and slip gracefully under the planes of his summer-tan skin, like he’s made out of liquid instead of flesh and bone.

Sam bites his lip around a sound that Dean laments that he never got to hear unbridled, and starts to lower himself down.

Rationally Dean knows that cocks weren’t _made_ for this –he only skipped out on, like, half of Phys. Ed., thank you- but when Sam rolls his hips and eases down in one slow, steady, torturous push that’s got him opening up to let Dean in, Dean’s pretty sure he doesn’t want to do anything else for the rest of forever, put a fork in him, he is done.

“Ah, ah.” Sam’s breath catches in his chest when he’s got Dean’s cock as deep as it’s ever going to get and Dean has to uncross his eyes and take a step-by-step walk-through of how to breathe because he can’t remember for the life of him.

“Sam,” he bites off, because it’s the only word in the world that matters anymore. “Sammy.” He clutches for him, their skin slipping against one another. 

Sam’s all around him. Every angle, every touch, every sight, every smell. He’s bearing down on him from all sides and Dean’s about to lose his damn mind because there shouldn’t be this much goodyesplease in one place.

“Good?” Sam asks, and Dean’s sure that if he could uncross his eyes long enough to take in details he’d see a lit up expression all over Sam’s face. Because Sam wants this to be good for him, too. He wants to give Dean this, and he wants to make it spectacular.

Dean only sucks in a breath and holds on to Sam tighter, marking up every inch of Sam he can get to. 

Sam’s hair sticks to his temples, clumps together behind his ears and around the base of his skull. His body is a lavish snake when he churns his hips, doesn’t lift off and fuck back down but opts instead to roll and rock down on Dean, clenching his inner muscles and Dean doesn’t know if he’s got the sanctity of mind to handle being on the receiving end of the teasing right now.

He scores his fingernails down Sam’s back and Sam arches, spine bowing and Dean whines, grinds his heels into the mattress and bucks upwards. “Nobody likes a tease, Sam.”

“Not teasing.” Sam smiles, eyes flashing dark and brilliant as his lower lip gets snagged underneath his canine tooth. “Just wringing you out for all you’ve got, Dean.” He rolls his hips, tracing a figure-eight with his pelvis.

“Fuck.” Dean’s eyes roll back in his head and he is sure now that he’s actually fucking a demon.

Sam rolls his hips again, one hand planted solidly on Dean’s chest to steady himself as he rocks down on Dean’s dick purposefully, searchingly. Dean doesn’t know what he’s searching _for,_ exactly; he’s not educated enough in the ways of gay sex to really grasp what’s going on here, but he knows when Sam finds it because his fingers splay and clench into the meat of Dean’s pectoral and he outright _mewls._

Prostate, Dean’s brain supplies from some back file he didn’t know he had. He’s too dumbstruck watching the flush settles high on Sam’s cheekbones and the beads of sweat on his forehead catch in the lamplight like dewy windows in the morning to pay any attention.

“There, there,” Sam pants frantically. “Right there, Dean, c’mon.”

Sam’s reached a towering six feet, three inches in height last they measured, but he’s still eighteen. He’s still a little stringy and there are places on him that need filling out and toughening up. His face is still a little boyish, his eyes a little wide, his lips a little pink. His hair flops and bounces in time with him as his skinny teenager body works itself down on Dean’s cock and to Dean he’s god damn perfect.

Dean can feel Sam’s thighs tremble underneath his hands and bracketing his waist as he lifts himself up so that the rim of his hole is clinging around the crown of Dean’s dick, stuttering pulses of involuntarily clenching muscles keeping them together before Sam slams back down and they both shout out, sounding like the noises were punched straight out of their stomachs. Sam keeps the pace as well as he can but starts to lag, sobs of frustration wracking his chest.

“I can’t- I can’t,” he whimpers and slams home again. “Dean, please, please.”

Dean fucks up into Sam one last time before he rolls the both of them, Sam pressed down into the mattress underneath of him and there’s this feral, animal thing in the back of Dean’s head growling ‘yes, this, now, mine, fuck, take, take, take,’ and it takes a few moment to realize that Dean’s repeating the litany aloud. He digs his toes into the mattress for leverage and fucks Sam like he _means it._ Sam jolts underneath him with every snap of his hips, shouting out little ‘ah, ah, ah’s every time they clash together. They bite and scratch and grope, leaving every fingerprint and bite mark they can because they need to prove something both of them already know.

They belong to each other. 

Sam comes with Dean pistoning into him and whispering, “Everything, Sam. Everything,” into his ear.

Dean comes with Sam clenching around him and whispering, “Yes, yes, yes,” back.

-

When Sam Winchester was eight years old he realized he was in love with his older brother. He figures there’s no way to pinpoint when he actually fell in love with Dean. Somewhere between his first word being ‘Dee’ and him taking his first steps toward him, Sam guesses. He made Dean promise to marry him when he was six with a ring-pop, so mostly he doesn’t stress so much about the ‘when’ as much as he does the ‘why’.

Dean is…

Dean _is._

Sam doesn’t have words for what Dean is.

Dean’s everything. He’s smart and stupid and clever and crass and funny in the worst way and the best way and, to Sam, he _is_ everything.

He figures out that that’s not right when he’s ten and Matt and Colin Castillo down the street get into a fight on their front lawn and their mother has to drag them apart, shouting herself hoarse about how if they can’t get along she’s going to tan their hides.

There’s something wrong with Dean and him, then, if that’s the way it’s supposed to be. Well, something wrong with him at least.

He tries to bring it up once but Dean just tells him that Matt doesn’t know his ears from his ass and Sam giggles until he forgets why he was even upset. He shakes it off, settles back into life, but the thought never really leaves him.

He’s twelve when he realizes how deep that ‘wrongness’ about him goes.

He’s thirteen when he decides to kill himself.

He’s fourteen when he gets scared enough to try.

He’s fifteen when Dean scares him shitless by even considering the Marines and he tries to make everything right by going to Charlie instead of Dean, because Charlie’s sweet and smart and not his brother, and can scrub the blood off his face just as well as Dean can.

He’s sixteen when he and Charlie fuck for the first time and he knows that he shouldn’t be imagining he can hear Dean gasp and groan on the other side of the wall.

He’s seventeen when he finally pulls through on his ‘Healthy, Non Self-Destructive Lifestyle Choice’ that Dr. Okoro helped him come up with by getting into a top ten school across the continental United States.

He’s eighteen when Dean gets a call from his therapist, is gone until after dark, comes home and fucks Sam’s brains out.

Sam’s got a sore ass and a lot of questions. 

“Yer thinkin’ too loud,” Dean slurs into his collarbones.

Sam continues to fret, undeterred.

Dean rolls his eyes and re-focuses seriously, body shifting underneath Sam so he can prop himself on one elbow and stare down at Sam sternly. “Okay. What, Sam?”

“You know…” Sam nibbles at his lower lip. “This doesn’t have to change anything.”

There’s a dawning sort of malevolent wonderment in Dean’s eyes, like Sam just said something so stupid he’s actually almost impressed. “This changes everything.”

He catches Sam’s chin with his palm when he tries to turn away, angles his eyes up so they’re only paying attention to each other. “What’s bugging you, Sam?”

“What do you mean ‘what’s bugging me?’” Sam stares at him incredulously. “How are you not even freaking out a little bit right now!”

Dean makes a face like ‘oh, is _that_ it?’, like Sam’s concern for his mental health post-brother-fucking is something trivial, and settles back down, pulls Sam close so their chests press tight together and Sam can feel the movement telegraph all the way down to Dean’s stomach when he shrugs. “I dunno. I went to therapy.”

“You went-” Sam’s mocking repetition of Dean’s statement is interrupted by an incredulous bark. “I’ve been in therapy for four years and I’m not even handling this well, Dean!”

“Guess I’m just well-adjusted, then.” Dean shrugs again, shoots Sam a smug grin before it bleeds off his face slowly. “I mean… you don’t regret it or anything, do you?” He tenses, starts to recoil.

Sam punches him in the shoulder. Hard.

“Ow!” Dean hisses and pouts. “Shit, Sam!”

“Shut up,” Sam snaps and forces his way back under Dean’s arm, burrows into his chest and settles down for a nap, maybe elbowing and kneeing a bit more than necessary.

Dean’s fingers find Sam’s hair and Sam hums approvingly when he starts to comb out the kinks and scratch languorously at his scalp. Sam’s eyes slip shut and for the first time since he was fourteen, pinned to the floor underneath his older brother’s body and sporting some pretty impressive wood, that he’s felt okay about anything.

The nameless, emotive thing coiled tight in the chasm of Sam’s chest relaxes underneath his ribs for the first time since he fumbled open a package of sleeping pills and tore a page out of his algebra notebook four years ago and just started scribbling apologies.

He feels… good.

The sensation is so unusual in of itself that Sam confuses it with slight indigestion for a while.

“Hey, Sam?” Dean’s voice is pitched low, honey-sweet and rich.

“Mm?” Sam mumbles because he can’t be bothered to make coherent words and phrases right now.

“I was thinking…” Dean’s pause makes Sam open his eyes and for the first time Dean’s the one who looks like he’s not so sure about things.

“Yeah?” Sam says slowly, dragging the word out.

“What if we went on a road trip this summer?” He doesn’t look at Sam when he asks. “Over to California and back, maybe check out the Stanford campus while we’re there. Maybe we could see if there are any garages in town looking for some help?” Sam doesn’t know what expression in on his face when Dean finally musters up the courage to look at him, but his eyes get stuck and he gets brave enough to say, “Y’know, you and me and my baby and every motel room from here to Palo Alto. Maybe we could just take some time to figure us out?” His voice lilts up at the end in a muted, hopeful sort of pitch that Sam’s not sure he’s heard out of Dean’s mouth before.

The smile sneaks up on Sam, cracks across his lips like melting permafrost. “Yeah, Dean. I’d like that.”


End file.
